Us land covered by forests over the years

[mack3833]

I am trying to find out if someone could plese tell me how many acres of land in the United States used to be covered by forests in 1800, 1850, 1900, 1950 and in 200. Could you please help me?

Thanks,
Mack

 

[treeclimber165]

Sounds like a homework assignment to me! Did you look in your textbook?

 

[Randy Weaver]

The original forest cover in this country is estimated to have been approximately 820 million acres. The current forest cover is between 400 to 500 million acres. So your answer is somewhere in between.
Any numbers you get for the time period before maybe 1920 are just going to be educated guesses anyway because no one was out there on the frontier keeping track of what was cut. Not until forestry became established and Americans became interested in conservation around the turn of the century did any really solid reliable data start to be recorded.

 

[John Paul Sanborn]

then there is the statistic that states there are more trees now then in the 1600's. This is true, then the trees were monsterouse old growth, now they are mostly spindly little saplings.

The majority of our forests went to fuelling the steam railroad.

 

[swampwhiteoak]

The best I recall, speaking of acreage of forests and not volume, there was a peak in forest acreage around 1620 or so. (when the majority of native americans died due to disease their fields and tallgrass prairie hunting grounds reverted to forest) After that it declined until about 1920 and then rose to its current levels.

Numbers from "US Forest Facts and Trends" available at http://fia.fs.fed.us

1630 - 1,045 million acres
1907- 759 million acres
1997 - 770 million acres