Before the satellite era, forest extent is reconstructed: pollen, climate models, and maps of how people used land. There is no continuous hectare census from 10,000 BCE.
Five plates: vegetation at the last glacial maximum, a map of biomes under a recent climate, and Ellis anthromes: human-shaped biomes: for 1700, 1900, and 2000.
Reconstruction, not satellite. Ray & Adams 2001 GIS vegetation, ~25,000-15,000 BP (~18,000 years ago). Ice sheets, more desert, less closed forest than now. This is older and colder than 10,000 BCE. Early Holocene forests were already expanding off this minimum.
https://intarch.ac.uk/journal/issue11/rayadams_toc.html
License:
CC BY 3.0
Estimate / analogue: not a dated mid-Holocene pollen map. Ville Koistinen’s compiled biome plate (CC BY-SA). Useful for where forest can live under a recent climate. Mid-Holocene (~6,000 years ago) often had a greener Sahara and shifted forest limits; this drawing does not show that.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vegetation.png
License:
CC BY-SA 3.0
Reconstruction of human-shaped biomes, Ellis / SEDAC v2. Wild and remote woodlands still dominate much of the Americas, Africa, and boreal Eurasia. Cropland and villages already heavy in Europe, India, and eastern China. Not a tree-cover percent map.
https://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/data/set/anthromes-anthropogenic-biomes-world-v2-1700
License:
CC BY 2.0
Same Ellis / SEDAC series, industrial-era step. Cropland, rangeland, and settlements have spread. Still a model of population and land use, not Landsat.
https://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/data/set/anthromes-anthropogenic-biomes-world-v2-1900
License:
CC BY 2.0
Ellis / SEDAC v2 at the door of the satellite era. Intensive anthromes cover much of the habitable land. Compare with the NASA NDVI shelf: different legend, different quantity.
https://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/data/set/anthromes-anthropogenic-biomes-world-v2-2000
License:
CC BY 2.0
How tall the forest canopy is, measured by spaceborne lidar as a mean top height on a grid of about 1 kilometre.
Open the layer
Aboveground biomass density from spaceborne lidar, mapped in tonnes per hectare.
Open the layer
Where fire burned in 2023, as the annual burned fraction on a quarter-degree grid.
Open the layer
Climatic and ecological zones used for forest reporting: a zoning of land by climate and ecology.
Open the layer
Where the 2015 forest-management map marks planted forest and short-rotation timber plantation, with the reported total of about 312 million hectares.
Open the layer
Country totals of living-biomass carbon in 2025, aboveground plus belowground, from the forest assessment, with the five-pool global total alongside.
Open the layer
Where the 2021 land-cover map assigns the tree-cover class, counted as the share of each cell.
Open the layer
Where the peat map records peat: a global extent of organic soils.
Open the layer
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations reports that forests cover 4.14 billion hectares, 32 percent of the world land, based on reports from 236 countries and areas.
Open the layer
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations reports at least 1.18 billion hectares of primary forest, 29 percent of all forest: naturally regenerating forest of native tree species with no clearly visible signs of human activity.
Open the layerSource: Global Forest Resources Assessment 2025, primary forests
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations reports that the world forest area shrank by a net 4.12 million hectares a year in 2015 to 2025, down from 10.7 million hectares a year in 1990 to 2000.
Open the layer
The World Resources Institute reports that the world lost 4.3 million hectares of tropical primary rainforest in 2025, 36 percent less than in the record year 2024.
Open the layerSource: World Resources Institute, Global Forest Review analysis of tropical forest loss in 2025
A 2015 study in the journal Nature combined 429,775 forest plot measurements with remote sensing and mapping layers and estimated that there are about 3.04 trillion trees on Earth.
Open the layerSource: Nature, Mapping tree density at a global scale (2015)
Definitions, sources, and the rest of the published set.
Open the layer
July canopy greenness from space, 2001-2025.
Open the layer
The long view, the years we can measure, and three possible paths.
Open the layer
