Good News for Forests – and Foresters

In the 1810, a remarkable transition happened in Denmark: Forests ceased shrinking and began to expand. The turnaround was driven by several factors, such as migration of people to cities and the abandonment of less fertile fields. Forest area subsequently began to recover in the rest of Europe and the United States. Now, an analysis of global forest data suggests that forests are returning in more and more countries, which leads the authors to predict that the volume of wood in the world's forests will likely stabilize in the coming decades.

The data come from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, which last year released a report on the trends in forests from 229 countries between 1990 and 2005. An international group of researchers led by forest ecologist Pekka Kauppi of the University of Helsinki, Finland, dug into the numbers. In a novel approach, the researchers compared trends in both forest area and forest density for the 50 most-forested nations.