The U.S. Forest Monitor: Establishing a historical baseline for the drivers and climate impacts of permanent forest loss

This report introduces the U.S. Forest Monitor, a new system for tracking permanent forest conversion across the United States and reveals that forest loss is occurring at a significant and increasing scale. The burden of forest loss is unevenly distributed with 11 states representing 70% of all loss nationally. Forestland provides critical benefits including habitat and biodiversity, clean water and air, outdoor recreation, healthy soils, and climate regulation. Forests today face many threats, including fire, pest outbreaks and other stressors. Permanent deforestation, the focus of this report, involves the clearing of forests for another land use – like development and cropland - that persists for the long term. Our analysis finds that between 1990 and 2017 as many as 350,000 acres per year were converted to persistent non-forest—equivalent to losing roughly one football field every two minutes for 28 years. This resulted in approximately 2 billion metric tons of CO2e emissions from release of stored carbon, lost potential for future carbon storage (foregone sequestration), and albedo effects, or changes in CO2e emissions from land cover reflectivity.