US News U.S. Cities Are Losing 36 Million Trees a Year

[tom_mai78101]

U.S. urban forests are in a crisis.

Cities in half the states in the country lost a significant amount of tree cover over a five year period, according to a new study. In some cases, the changes were drastic, amounting to almost half a percent of a city’s tree cover every year. Without programs to counter the trend, those fractions of a percent add up to significant, noticeable losses over just a few years.

David Nowak and Eric Greenfield, two U.S. Forest Service scientists who have been following urban forests for years, wrote the new report. While they’re hesitant to call it a trend, the new research builds on their previous work, which found similar results. That suggests the loss of urban forests across the country may be ongoing and not just a hiccup in the data.

Here’s Richard Conniff, reporting for Scientific American:

The biggest losses on a percentage basis were in Rhode Island, Georgia, Alabama and Nebraska, together with the District of Columbia. Only three states—Mississippi, Montana and New Mexico—saw increased metropolitan tree cover, all by “nonsignificant” amounts. (State-by-state figures are available here.) The research team used Google Earth imagery to examine 1,000 randomly chosen points in each state for a before-and-after comparison over a five-year period, generally ending in 2014 or 2015.

Read more here. (Public Broadcasting Service, PBS)