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Concept
Forest cover
Summary
Forest cover is the amount of forest that covers a particular area of land. It may be measured as relative (in percent) or absolute (in square kilometres/square miles). Nearly a third of the world's land surface is covered with forest, with closed-canopy forest accounting for 4 - 5 billion hectares of land. Forests provide many ecosystem services that humans and animals cannot survive without, but anthropogenic actions and climate change are threatening global forest cover in potentially irreversible ways.
According to the FAO's Global Forest Resources Assessment 2020, the world has a total forest area of 4.06 billion hectares (10.0 billion acres), which is 31% of the total land area. More than one-third of the world's forest cover is primary forest: naturally regenerated forests with native species and no visible indication of human activity.
More than half (54%) of the world's forests are found in only five countries (Brazil, Canada, China, Russia and the United States). Russia has the largest forest area in the world, at 815 million hectares (a fifth of global forest cover). The other four countries all house more than 100 million hectares of forest each. The small African nation of Gabon, while only containing 0.58% of the world's forest cover, has the largest forest-to-land ratio of any country (91.3%).
Forests are found throughout the world on a spatial scale determined by temperature and precipitation. There are four types of forest biomes: tropical, temperate, subtropical, and boreal. Most of the world's forest cover (45%) is found in the tropics, which is defined by high temperature and humidity. The boreal zone, which includes Russia and the Arctic, contains the second largest amount of forest (33%). The temperate/subtropical zone, located between the tropical and the boreal, contains 25%. Almost half of global forest cover (49%) is relatively continuous, while 9% is found in fragments with little to no connectivity. Roughly 80% of the world's forest area is found in patches larger than 1 million hectares (2.
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