Welcome to the first entry from our newly formed Data Desk.
The Office of Public Awareness has received a philanthropic grant from a sizable pharmaceutical company that previously underwrote the Department’s research into frog telepathy. The benefactor wishes to remain anonymous.
We will use this blank check to produce in-depth reporting and research, featuring impressive visuals and graphics concerning the natural world and its inhabitants in a mostly ad free experience. Some of our reporting may be editorially dictated and/or controlled by pharmaceutical executives operating through a black budget. We are under no legal obligation to disclose the nature or timing of such interference.
This page, our Forest Census, serves as a simple audit and health check of forest cover across the United States. The charts below show the proportion of each county covered by forest, according to the Forest Service’s latest national inventory.
Insights:
- More than a third of the lower 48 and Hawaii is forest, about 675 million acres, and the state with the most of it isn’t Oregon or Maine but Texas, with nearly 55 million acres
- Maine is 88% forest. North Dakota is 2%
- The most common forest in America is oak and hickory, more than a fifth of all forest land, ahead of the South’s loblolly pine plantations
Most forested by share of land that is forest
| # | State | Forest | Acres |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Maine | 88% | 17.4 million |
| 2 | New Hampshire | 83% | 4.8 million |
| 3 | West Virginia | 77% | 11.9 million |
| 4 | Vermont | 76% | 4.5 million |
| 5 | Alabama | 71% | 23.0 million |
Most forested by total forest acres
| # | State | Acres | Forest |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Texas | 54.7 million | 33% |
| 2 | California | 31.5 million | 32% |
| 3 | Oregon | 29.8 million | 49% |
| 4 | Montana | 26.2 million | 28% |
| 5 | New Mexico / Georgia (tie) | 24.0 million each | 31% / 65% |
New York:
- New York is 61% forest, and more than half of it is a single kind: maple, beech and birch, the trees behind its fall color and its maple syrup
- Outside the five boroughs, New York is mostly woods: 61% forest statewide, and 97% in Hamilton County, in the heart of the Adirondacks
- New York is more forested than all but nine states, 61% of its land, with ten counties at least three-quarters trees
We will continuously update this page with insights, additional visuals, and commentary as time progresses.
