How Many Trees Were There 100 Years Ago? #2. 100 Years ago, the US had only about 70 million trees. Back then, the US had approximately 70 million trees, because the late 1910s witnessed an exponential growth of the timber industry as a result of the rapid developments in the recreation and construction industry.
The lazy estimate at the time was that there were approximately 400 billion trees on the planet–not based on particularly good or well-documented science.
Number of Trees Removed in The Last 100 Years
According to the UN, Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO)'s forest report State of the World's Forests 2020, there has been a 13% decrease in forest cover over the past 100 years. This, therefore, equates to approximately 3.9 billion trees removed in the past 100 years.
In the millennia since then a growing demand for agricultural land means we've lost one-third of global forests – an area twice the size of the United States. Half of this loss occurred in the last century alone.
To date, most forest assessments have estimated tree cover based on satellite images. In 2005, one group converted that coverage into a measurement known as tree density and concluded the planet was home to 400 billion trees, or 61 trees per person alive at the time.
The Earth has become five percent greener in 20 years. In total, the increase in leaf area over the past two decades corresponds to an area as large as the Amazon rainforests.
Once these trillion trees are fully grown, these new forests could capture between 488 and 1012 billion tons of CO2. That's about ¼ to ⅓ of all human CO2 emissions so far (2.2 trillion tons). But that's not all! Restoring forests achieves much more than just tackling the climate crisis.
Image by Author. According to this calculated data, in the area we performed our study on, 3522.27 square kilometres of forests or healthy vegetation got deforested by bushfires or other reasons.
Australia is one of the worst developed countries in the world for broadscale deforestation—killing tens of millions of native animals (including threatened species) and wiping out endangered forests and woodlands. In fact, we've cleared nearly half of our forest cover in the last 200 years!
According to the FAO, Nigeria has the world's highest deforestation rate of primary forests. It has lost more than half of its primary forest in the last five years. The causes cited are logging, subsistence agriculture, and the collection of fuelwood. Almost 90% of West Africa's rainforest has been destroyed.
America has more trees now than it's had in 100 years.
More trees now than ever
Worldwide tree cover has grown by 2.24 million square kilometers — the size of Texas and Alaska combined — in the last 35 years, according to a paper in the science journal “Nature.”
After studying more than 30 years worth of satellite images, a team of researchers concluded that global tree cover had increased by 7%, or 864,868 square miles, approximately the combined size of Alaska and Texas.
Some trees can live for centuries or even millennia but the secrets behind their long life spans have eluded scientists. However, new research has found that the ginkgo tree, which can live more than 1,000 years, doesn't really show any expected effects of aging — they appear to be primed for immortality.
There are a large number of pine trees in the world, but even though there are a wide variety of pine trees, they generally live between 100 and 200 years. There are exceptions, like the bristlecone pine, which can live to be thousands of years old.
The Great Basin Bristlecone Pine (Pinus longaeva) has been deemed the oldest tree in existence, reaching an age of over 5,000 years old. The bristlecone pine's success in living a long life can be attributed to the harsh conditions it lives in.
Based on their observations, the researchers estimate that it should take about 21 years for the Australian ecosystem to soak up all the carbon it lost in the 2019-20 bush fires. That's under average conditions. In a cooler, wetter climate, it could be done in a decade or so.
For millennia, Australia's Nullarbor Plain has been barren of trees; in fact, that's what "Nullarbor" means. But recent research into the caves in this desert region reveal that the area was once home to a dense forest.
Deforestation & Tree Cover Loss
Approximately 500,000 hectares of native woodlands and forests are destroyed across Australia every year. Due to excessive tree-clearing, an estimate of 750 million native animals in Australia will die by 2030. There are about 24 billion standard trees in Australia.
From 2001 to 2021, Australia lost 8.73Mha of tree cover, equivalent to a 21% decrease in tree cover since 2000, and 2.34Gt of CO₂e emissions.
"Most deforestation in Australia is just for livestock pasture," he told Hack. Urban sprawl is a problem in the areas where it occurs but it's a drop in the ocean compared to the amount of forest destruction just to produce livestock for pasture. And the state with the highest rate of land clearing is Queensland.
Is a tree alive? Yes, but not all of it. Only 1% of a tree is living, and the rest of the tree is made of non-living cells. The non-living parts of the tree provide necessary support to keep the living parts alive and growing.
That figure sounds comfortably high – until you understand that we are uprooting 15 billion trees every year and only replanting around five billion. With a net annual loss of 10 billion trees, year on year, we can expect Earth to be totally treeless by 2319.
A single mature tree, meanwhile, may take in about 50 pounds of carbon dioxide per year. At this rate, it would take 640 trees per person to account for all American emissions, which adds up to more than 200 billion trees.