Forests of the World

Simply based on the forestlands I typically see in western U.S. and Canada, I would have guessed much lower. While our second growth forests easily cover more than that fraction of our regional total, much of it was not artificially replanted, but regrew naturally, so shouldn't fall under the plantation label. Or are others using a different meaning?

 

I'm thinking also of hiking trail views, and the unimproved roads accessing many of them. Though this sample method also suffers selection bias. Who wants to hike through clearcuts? Who wants to propose or approve clearcuts across well known trails and pull out public opposition? And of course, numerous hiking trails are in federal Wilderness areas protected from harvest.

Growing up elsewhere in the forested Pacific Northwest, a middle school field trip included a stop at a place where grownups were actively sticking baby trees into holes in a recent clearcut. This was presented as a regular practice. But years later it was noticed that such replants were biased strongly towards visibility from the most heavily trafficked (but still unpaved) forest roads. Getting deeper into the forest on far lesser used roads, there were still very many past clearcuts, but the replants became surprisingly sparse.

Dad's farm-ranch is half forested, and logged multiple times. First logging was scattershot from initial white-people settlement up to about the Great War (WWI for the youngsters here). Second was early 1950s, cut heavily. Third was 1990s until about five years ago, very slowly and quite selectively over just the lower portion, with most of the very best sawlogs left to continue fattening for some future harvest, no clearcutting. Never was there any manual replanting of it, or of the neighboring logged plots. They all regrew by nature.

I'm not familiar with the practice of coppicing. But a quick search finds it being applied to tree species not present in my familiar places. Doing it to our trees, seems to kill them.