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What Is This Indicator, and Why Is It Important?
This indicator reports the percentage of forest area in several
different management categories. These range from “reserved
lands” (forests in national parks, wilderness areas,
and other similar areas) to forests under intensive management
involving replanting after harvest. Other forest lands are
subject to a wide variety of both management practices and
restrictions on use.
How a forest is managed influences the goods and services
that it provides. Heavily managed areas produce fiber and
other wood products, while the value of reserved areas may
lie in the solitude they offer, the rare plants and animals
they shelter, or the watersheds they protect.
What Do the Data Show? In 2002, 11% of
eastern forests and 4% of western forests were in intensively
managed plantations (planted timberlands). Eighteen percent
of western forests and 3% of eastern forests were in reserved
forest lands (federally designated wilderness areas or national
parks). (Data are not currently available to support national
reporting on reserved lands in private or other public ownership.)
Nationwide, planted timberlands increased
ten-fold from 1953 to 2002; reserved forest land nearly doubled (although
some of this increase, especially in Alaska, may have resulted from changes
in classification of lands, rather than in their management or legal
status (see technical note for detailed data on Alaska).
Other forest lands receive less-intensive management activity,
which may include periodic timber harvest. Nineteen percent
of forests in the West grow too slowly to support timber harvest
under current economic conditions; these forests are identified
as “other natural or semi-natural forest lands”
in the graph above.
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