Which country had more forest on 01-01-2001, than it had on 01-01-1901?

Factual Questions
1

I keep hearing a piece of trivia repeated, and as Tu B’Shevat (the New Year for Trees) is coming up on the Jewish calendar, the fact, or factoid, as it may be is making the rounds again. It’s as follows:

“Israel is one of only two countries that had more trees (or, “more forested acreage”) at the outset of the 21st century than it did at the outset of the 20th.”

I have looked up the Jewish National Fund, the group that has been planting trees in Israel since its founding in 1901, and yes, it is the case that in Israel, there actually is more forested area now than 100 years ago, (and more trees in number, to the extent that one can count something like that). There’s an unusual circumstance of a concerted effort to turn a desert into a forest, that included some irrigation projects as well, but ultimately the climate was actually altered.

Israel is extremely green now, wherever you look. It’s amazingly green.

Pretty much every other country has lost forest to farmland or housing projects, but Israel was desert. Some of the desert became farmland, and some became neighborhoods as well.

But most other countries lost uninhabited-by-humans forest, while the JNF made habitable land out of uninhabitable desert.

The thing about Israel, though, is that this has been really a reforestation project. What is happening now in the Amazon, and more slowly, but just as surely in the US Southwest, with forests being ploughed away to make room for housing or farmland, and then being farmed until barren, or lived on until dry and polluted, happened to Israel a long time ago, and turned it into a desert.

But, enough plugging for the JNF, and preaching environmentalism.

Here’s my question: apparently some other country has engaged in either reforestation, or in claiming a natural desert, and has been successful enough to also be able to say that it has more trees now than it did in 1901.

Be darned if I can find out which country, though.

You’d think it would be bragging-- unless, of course, the answer is something like Iceland, which is gaining trees as it loses tundra-- that’s the only circumstance I can think under which more trees would be a bad thing.

I tried looking up the Georgian Republic (formerly of the Soviet Union), because I know that in the 1950s and 60s, there was a big tree-planting effort involving mainly Eucalyptus trees to dry up the very swampy natural land, partly to control the mosquito population, and partly to make the land more farmable, but I can’t find any info on Georgia that discusses this. I know it happened, because I was in Georgia (Tbilisi) in 1977, and there were plaques everywhere, many in Georgian, Russian and English, describing the process, and any Georgian you talked to was happy to tell you about it.

I’ve Googled just about every permutation of the question I can think of, and can’t find the answer.

I suppose it’s possible there is no other country, and the trivia bit is wrong, or maybe several countries share the distinction, Israel just has such a greater percentage of forested area (like 150% more forest now than in 1901), that it’s worth noting, while other countries with more forest have just 1% or 2% more.

Or maybe it’s some country that owes it new forestland to a border shift, and not any new forest growth, and that’s why nobody is bragging too loudly.

So I’m appealing to you guys, because there’s gotta be someone out there who knows: what country/ies besides Israel has/ve this distinction? How was it accomplished?

I don’t need a lot of cites and footnotes, although I appreciate them. But if you want to say “I was in [country] in 1999, and they bragged about their reforestation program,” I’m happy to listen.

If mods want to move this because it gets clogged with WAGS and unsupported opinions, I don’t mind, but I really am hoping for at least a few serious answers.

2

Ireland has more forest now than in 1900, due to a program of reforestation. But I am sceptical of the claim that there are only two countries that can say this.

3

Seems like there are indeed several European countries where forest area has grown.

4

In Latvia, forested area has doubled over the past 100 years, to more than 50%.

Estonia’s land area was 34% forests in 1939 and is now 50% forests.

The main reasons: Abandoned agricultural land was naturally reforested. Non-arable land was intentionally forested. Swamps were drained and became forested. And large areas of forest are now under state protection.

5

That’s not really true.

While there has been a lot of reforestation in the southern desert, most of the reforestation efforts have been in central and northern Israel. And it’s not like these areas didn’t have trees in the past - they definitely did. Israel (Palestine at the time) underwent massive deforestation in the late 19th Century and early 20th Century by the Ottoman Empire, mainly to fuel its railroad projects. The forests that have been replanted have basically brought the country part of the way back to the level it was in before the Industrial Revolution.

6

The United Kingdom certainly has more mature trees than it had 100 or 200 years ago. There have been many Forestry Commission forests planted, but those are mostly grown for timber, so maybe they don’t count.
But all over the country hardwood trees are growing into protected forests, woods and copses that at one time would also have been harvested for timber and firewood that are no longer cut. Additionally large areas of former industrial land has been left to recover naturally, which in most cases results in a succession of plants ending in maple or birch woods.

7

"Both the Netherlands and Britain had empires that relied heavily on the sea and their naval strength. In order to build ships, they needed wood – and in 1900, only 2 - 3 percent of their territory was still covered with forests. Both countries have since been able to increase their forest area to 10-12 percent, as data from 2010 shows. "

8

So am I, but this gets repeated a lot around this holiday, so I thought I’d find out what the actual stats are.

9

Iceland was completely deforested by the Norse settlers in just a few hundred years after arrival in the 800s-900s, but has slowly worked on regaining forest for the last hundred. Iceland’s Long Road to Reforestation - Geography Realm

10

There is probably more than one such country. The United States is one that increased its acreage of forest slightly between 1900 and 2000. This PDF from the US Forest Service (page 7) has a graph showing a dramatic fall in forest acreage from over a billion acres in 1630 to about 754 million acres in 1910. After 1910 there is a slight rise (1.6%) to 766 million acres in 2012. They don’t have exact figures from 1900 and 2000 but eyeballing the graph indicates a slight rise in that time.

Yes, some forest acreage has been converted in that time to residential and commercial development. But that’s more than offset by huge swaths of marginal agricultural land that has been allowed to revert to forest. Some states have rebounded better than others. For example, New Hampshire was nearly 100% forested in colonial times. That fell to less than 50% (I want to say closer to 30%, but I can’t find the reference right now) around 1900 following clear-cutting for timber and clearing of land for dairy farms. Now with better forestry practices, and the decline of the dairy industry forested land is back up to 81 percent.

11

Found it. William Sargent in A Year in the Notch page 30 says that by 1830 only 10 percent of New Hampshire was forested, largely as a result of clearing for dairy farming. On page 101 he says that New England is the largest area in the world that was once primarily agricultural but which has been allowed to revert to a more wild state.

12

Seems like it’s been pretty well covered by everyone else. I want to echo the decline in using local trees for construction and fuel. Wood ship builders deforested a lot of Europe prior to the industrial age, and the deforestation of Great Britain prompted the switch to coal as a primary fuel source. American railroads burned massive amounts of wood before coal became easily available, while also using it to build their early bridges and trestles, and for cross-ties and even early coaches.

Here in Cincinnati, we have broad river valleys surrounded by steep hillsides leading to higher plains. Photos from a century ago show these hillsides being almost entirely barren, having been harvested for building material and firewood. Now they’re universally reforested because we don’t burn wood anymore, lumber comes from managed forests, they’re too steep to build on anyway, and they’re famously unstable even with the help of tree roots holding them in place.

So all this combined with reforestation of marginal farmlands, better ecological principles, and active efforts to replant, it doesn’t surprise me to see first-world countries with long settlement histories having more forest now than a century ago.

13

Easter Island almost certainly has got more trees now than it did a century ago. Not sure it counts as a country - it’s more a “special territory” of Chile.

14

You see this all over Connecticut, too - many forested areas in state parks still have the rock walls that once separated pastures.

15

In many cases it’s gone through the process twice. The successional processes that began the reforestation created huge white pine forests as the fields were abandoned. Second growth white pine dominated New England forests for many years and was then cut to make shipping containers and structural lumber. It wasn’t until after the cutting of the pine that the hardwoods came back.

16

Wouldn’t the hardwoods have been taking over from the white pine anyway? I understand that, in the shelter of an existing white pine stand (assuming decent soil, etc), hardwood saplings will outcompete the white pine saplings and will replace the white pine in the next generation or so. (and, if left alone long enough, then hemlock will replace the hardwood. But more often a hurricane or something comes along before then)

17

Mt. Desert Island in Maine was called that because of the scarcity of trees on the heights:

That’s hard to believe now. I’ve been there many times, most recently a couple of years ago, and there are trees all the way to the top.

When you visit Concord and Lexington in Massachusetts, they tell you how their present well-forested state is nothing like its appearance in colonial days, when many of the trees were cut down not only to clear farmland, but also to provide building material and firewood for both homes and industries – a continuous need that I don’t think we fully appreciate today.

18

You’re completely right on the long term. I just like to marvel at the fact that some things that we take for granted as “old” may have changed many times in just the last two hundred years. If I remember right, Aldo Leopold talks about it in one of his essays.
Being from the west coast, the New England fall with the leaves turning is such a important part of of what we are shown in the media. I also tend to think of colonial times as so long ago. Those two concepts challenge my perception of change over time.

19

In North America at least, is it true that much of the forest growth occurred only after the one-two punch of human arrival and climate change wiped out the megafauna? Before that most of America was a steppe, with trees kept in check by large grazing animals, much like the African savanna?

I had often heard this but am unsure to what extent it is true.

20

Sounds basically correct. Much of the middle of America – the Great Plains between the Appalachian and Rocky Mountains – was prairie, which is like steppe. And there were plenty of buffalo roaming the prairies before the post-Civil War railroads brought (1) lots of buffalo hunters and (2) homesteading farmers who plowed the prairies.
Wiki on prairies.

But I don’t think that applies to the northern parts of the East Coast (Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, northern New York), West Coast (north of, say, the Bay Area), or the Great Lakes (the “Northwoods” of Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan).