FACT: American forests have 1,000 trees for every man, woman, and child.
Scientists estimate that America's forest land contains some 230 billion trees. With more trees being planted each year, we have more trees now than we did 30 years ago. On the nation's commercial forest land, net annual growth exceeds removals through harvesting by an impressive 31 percent each year.

	FACT: Every year, the United States has more forest land than the year before.
The United States currently has approximately 70 percent of the forest land that existed when Columbus discovered America. About one-third of the United States--728 million acres--is forrested. And every year, the number of trees grows. We have added 28 million cubic feet of wood to America’s forests since 1977.

	FACT: One third of America’s forests—245 million acres—is set aside in national parks and wilderness areas for wildlife and recreation.
This third of the U.S. forests is bigger than Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Austria, Holland, Switzerland, Belgium, and Israel combined. The remaining lands are classified as "commercial" and can be used for growing and harvesting repeated crops of trees.

	FACT: Federal, state, and local governments also own 136 million acres of commercial forest land.
Of the nation's 483 million acres of commercial forest land, only fifty-seven percent--some 276 million acres--are held in relatively small tracts by individual private owners. About 70 million acres---or 14 percent of the total commercial forest land--- are owned by the forest products industry.

FACT: National parks are distinct from national forests. National parks are intentionally set aside for the public to enjoy whereas national forests are working forests, set up by Congress in 1897 to provide the nation with a continual source of wood products.

The national forests also provide an important resource for wildlife habitat, for fishing, camping and other forms of recreation. By contrast, our many national parks, like Yellowstone, are not managed for timber or other resource production. These parks are intended to approximate natural conditions. In fact, when there's a fire on a national park, areas where the trees were burned are not replanted. The forest grows back naturally...no matter how long it takes. This protection is even more extensive in the 90 million acres formally designated by Congress as wilderness areas. There, even roads are not allowed, so that forest land remains much as it was before Columbus arrived.

FACT: Logging is an orderly process of removing all of the trees of the same age from a stand rather than picking and choosing.

Some seedlings won't grow in the shade of mature trees, so removing all of the trees in the stand allows the light to reach the forest floor. And sometimes something calamitous, like a fire or windstorm, a tree disease, or an insect epidemic, requires that the damaged trees be removed so that new trees can get a start. In each case, the type of harvest method (e.g. selective thinning and even-age management) is dictated by the type of tree being harvested, the terrain, and what conditions are needed to start the next forest there

FACT: New life flourishes in a logged area almost immediately.

Within one to two years, the area will be covered abundantly with grasses, bushes and seedlings, and there will be a noticeable increase in wildlife. Within five years, the meadowlands will begin to fill in as those seedlings become young trees. Depending on soil and climate conditions, you will see the first signs of the new forest within 10 to 15 years. When a select harvest is completed, the smaller trees left in the area will increase in size rapidly with the new infusion of light and moisture.

FACT: American timber companies replant when they cut.

Forest products companies are in the business of growing and harvesting trees, so reforestation is important to them. In fact, three quarters of all the trees planted in America last year were planted by forest products companies and private timberland owners. And logging companies pay a special fee to fund for replanting and reforestation when they buy the right to harvest a section of timber on state or national forests. In hardwood forests, nature replants on its own using seeds and stump sprouts to grow trees for the future. Foresters may leave areas to reforest naturally from cones and seeds.

	FACT: Annually, the forestry community plants more than 2.3 billion seedlings in the United States. That's more than nine new trees for each person in America.
The forest products industry planted nearly 55 percent, and tree farmers and other non-industrial private landowners planted another 28 percent of the total. The rest were planted by federal, state and local agencies. Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Oregon and Washington are the leading tree-planting states, in that order.

FACT: The United States has 7.5 million acres of old growth trees, trees 200 or more years old. If you put those trees together, they would form a band two miles wide stretching from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean.

And over half of that acreage, 4.2 million acres, is protected in national parks and wilderness areas. Those trees can never be cut. All of the really old trees, like the giant sequoias, are protected. Even in our working forests, as much as a quarter of the remaining old growth is located in areas where they will never be logged. Where old growth is being harvested, it is being cut at a rate of only one percent a year. And as those old forests are harvested, they are replaced with new, vigorous forests that will one day be considered old growth before it dies. Because trees live so long, it is easy to think of them as permanent. But they are not. If natural threats like fires, windstorms and insects don't get them, trees eventually die of old age--to be replaced by young trees, which eventually become old trees.

FACT: Logging companies follow very careful regulations that prohibit logging across streams, and use logging and road-building techniques which further reduce erosion.

Special measures are also taken to leave a buffer of trees along stream banks to guard against erosion. Chances are the water you drink today comes from a forest. Communities near forest areas depend on the streams for water, and generally don't have a problem with water quality. In fact, some of the purest water in the country comes from areas which are logged on a regular basis. Logging is a watershed practice to even out the flow of water that would otherwise be evaporated by the trees.

FACT: Forests are good for water because forest soils act much like a blotter, filtering microscopic organisms from the water. And younger forests clean water better than older forests.

In fact, the closer natural water is to a forest, the cleaner it is--which explains why municipal reservoirs are located as close as possible to forests, collecting the water at its cleanest point. The forest also regulates the flow of water. Forest soil 36 inches deep can absorb 18 inches of precipitation, then gradually release it into natural channels. In this way, forests slow the volume of rainwater discharged into streams and rivers immediately after a rainstorm or snowfall. An over-mature forest of large, old trees removes little nitrogen through its root system, passing most of it back to the soil. Younger trees filter out nearly all of the nitrogen and phosphorus, leaving water virtually free of these pollutants.