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Forest: This Article Is About A Community of Trees. For Other Uses, See - For Broader Coverage of This Topic, See

A forest is an area dominated by trees covering at least 0.5 hectares with a tree canopy of over 10%. Forests cover about 31% of the global land area and are found on every continent. They contain 80% of the planet's biomass and account for 75% of the primary production on Earth. Forests vary in type by latitude, elevation, precipitation and include boreal, tropical moist, temperate and other biomes. Nearly half of forests remain relatively intact while human activities both positively and negatively impact forest ecosystems.

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26 views2 pages

Forest: This Article Is About A Community of Trees. For Other Uses, See - For Broader Coverage of This Topic, See

A forest is an area dominated by trees covering at least 0.5 hectares with a tree canopy of over 10%. Forests cover about 31% of the global land area and are found on every continent. They contain 80% of the planet's biomass and account for 75% of the primary production on Earth. Forests vary in type by latitude, elevation, precipitation and include boreal, tropical moist, temperate and other biomes. Nearly half of forests remain relatively intact while human activities both positively and negatively impact forest ecosystems.

Uploaded by

Ellaine
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Forest

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


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This article is about a community of trees. For other uses, see Forest
(disambiguation).
For broader coverage of this topic, see Plant community.

A conifer forest in the Swiss Alps (National Park)

The Adirondack Mountains of Upstate New York form the southernmost part of the Eastern forest-boreal


transition ecoregion.
Forest on Mount Dajt, Albania

A forest is an area of land dominated by trees.[1] Hundreds of definitions of forest are


used throughout the world, incorporating factors such as tree density, tree height, land
use, legal standing and ecological function.[2][3][4] The Food and Agriculture
Organization defines a forest as land spanning more than 0.5 hectares with trees
higher than 5 meters and a canopy cover of more than 10 percent, or trees able to
reach these thresholds in situ. It does not include land that is predominantly under
agricultural or urban land use.[5] Using this definition FRA 2020 found that forests
covered 4.06 billion hectares or approximately 31 percent of the global land area in
2020 but are not equally distributed around the globe.[6]
Forests are the dominant terrestrial ecosystem of Earth, and are distributed around the
globe.[7] More than half of the world’s forests are found in only five countries (Brazil,
Canada, China, Russian Federation and United States of America). The largest part of
the forest (45 percent) is found in the tropical domain, followed by the boreal,
temperate and subtropical domains.[8]
Forests account for 75% of the gross primary production of the Earth's biosphere, and
contain 80% of the Earth's plant biomass. Net primary production is estimated at
21.9 gigatonnes carbon per year for tropical forests, 8.1 for temperate forests, and 2.6
for boreal forests.[7]
Forests at different latitudes and elevations, and with different precipitation and
evapotranspiration[9] form distinctly different biomes: boreal forests around the North
Pole, tropical moist forests and tropical dry forests around the Equator, and temperate
forests at the middle latitudes. Higher elevation areas tend to support forests similar to
those at higher latitudes, and amount of precipitation also affects forest composition.
Almost half the forest area (49 percent) is relatively intact, while 9 percent is found in
fragments with little or no connectivity. Tropical rainforests and boreal coniferous
forests are the least fragmented, whereas subtropical dry forest and temperate oceanic
forests are among the most fragmented. Roughly 80 percent of the world’s forest area
is found in patches larger than 1 million hectares. The remaining 20 percent is located
in more than 34 million patches across the world – the vast majority less than 1 000
hectares in size.[10]
Human society and forests influence each other in both positive and negative ways.
[11] Forests provide ecosystem services to humans and serve as tourist attractions.
Forests can also affect people's health. Human activities, including unsustainable use
of forest resources, can negatively affect forest ecosystems.

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