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What Is This Indicator, and Why Is It Important?
This indicator reports how much forest land there is in the
United States and who owns it.
Knowing how much land is forested and who owns that land
is vital to making informed decisions about forests. Gains
and losses in forest area directly affect the public’s
continued enjoyment of the goods and services that forests
provide—recreation, lumber, watershed protection, and
many other things. Public and private owners often have very
different goals and assumptions, differences that are reflected
in management priorities and practices.
What Do the Data Show? Forests today cover
about 749 million acres, or about a third of the total land
area of the United States, down from about 1 billion acres
at the time of European settlement. Most forest clearing
occurred in the East, ending by 1900. In recent decades,
the amount of forest land has been nearly stable, with an
increase of about 1%, or 10 million acres, from 1987 to
2002.
There are striking regional differences in patterns of ownership:
in the East, more than 80% of forest land is privately owned,
while in the West, about two-thirds is publicly owned. Forest
industry ownership accounts for about 13% of eastern forest
land and 4% of western forest land; a wide variety of individuals
and corporations own the rest.
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