The Ellis 12K chart reconstructs anthromes: wild, cultured, and intensive land: from 10,000 BCE to 2017. It is not FAO hectares. After 2000 the satellite figures are tighter.
Wild woodland has shrunk over the Holocene as cropland, pasture, and settlements grew. After 2000 the satellite record is tighter. Tropical primary conversion is not the same as boreal fire, and neither is a calendar date when “the forests end.”
If the recent rate of tropical primary loss continues, that forest keeps shrinking. A quieter fire year or a real moratorium can bend the line the other way: 2025 already did, once. Neither path is a date when forest disappears.
UMD/GFW humid-tropical primary loss was 6.7 million ha in 2024 (a fire-heavy record) and 4.3 million ha in 2025 (36 percent lower, still about 46 percent above a decade earlier). If a 4-7 million ha/year band persists, remaining primary humid tropics keep shrinking. Remaining primary area is not a single published GFW stock on this page; boreal FAO forest is a different ledger.
FRA 2025 already shows slower net loss than the 1990s (4.12 vs 10.7 million ha/year). Brazil’s 2025 share of the tropical-primary drop is the usual reminder that enforcement and commodity rules can move a global total in one year. The same WRI note says fire is a new normal: a lull is not a lock.
FAO forest expansion (6.78 million ha/year, 2015-2025) already offsets part of deforestation. Plantations and young secondary stands can grow that number without restoring primary structure or species. A better path is less conversion plus restoration that is measured as ecosystem, not as a press-release hectare.
Loss is not only weather. Commodity rules, fire enforcement, tenure, and parks have shifted the totals in named years.
After 2006, soy-linked clearing in the Brazilian Amazon fell sharply in the peer-reviewed record (Gibbs et al. 2015, Science). Leakage into the Cerrado is the honest caveat. Rules on who buys the crop changed the frontier. They can be undone.
Primary-forest and peat moratoria, plus fire enforcement after 2015, show up in GFW year notes as years when Indonesia’s loss cooled. El Niño and plantation demand can heat it again. Policy is a switch, not a vaccine.
Across several tropical basins, titled Indigenous lands often show lower conversion than nearby undesignated forest in GFW/WRI compilations. That is governance and presence, not a romantic “untouched” myth. Tenure still needs defending.
FRA 2025: about 813 million ha of forest: 20 percent: sits in legally established protected areas (+251 million ha since 1990). Paper parks exist. So do parks that hold. Protection is one tool next to commodity rules and fire crews.
The Maps room also keeps a Hansen / Global Forest Watch schematic of well-known loss frontiers. Open the forest-cover-loss card →
How tall the forest canopy is, measured by spaceborne lidar as a mean top height on a grid of about 1 kilometre.
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Aboveground biomass density from spaceborne lidar, mapped in tonnes per hectare.
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Where fire burned in 2023, as the annual burned fraction on a quarter-degree grid.
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Climatic and ecological zones used for forest reporting: a zoning of land by climate and ecology.
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Where the 2015 forest-management map marks planted forest and short-rotation timber plantation, with the reported total of about 312 million hectares.
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Country totals of living-biomass carbon in 2025, aboveground plus belowground, from the forest assessment, with the five-pool global total alongside.
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Where the 2021 land-cover map assigns the tree-cover class, counted as the share of each cell.
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Where the peat map records peat: a global extent of organic soils.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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July canopy greenness from space, 2001-2025.
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Ice-age vegetation, biomes, and land after people.
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