Centuries of logging is my guess! At least in the British Isles.

More like millenia .... for agriculture, culture, timber and fuel.

But there have been people in Italy and Spain for millennia, too - why do they still have so many more trees? Trees are of lower value, or harder to get to because they are in mountaineous areas?

Mountainous areas?

Yes if you look at a physical map of Italy vs. the map I posted above, you will see the forested areas seem to follow the Apennines. https://www.freeworldmaps.net/europe/italy/map.html

However I cannot think why that would be so determinative. Surely the Spanish, Romans, and Greeks especially knew how to build medieval villages, forts and castles high on peaks so they could have harvested trees from those areas too. Maybe they are mostly Pinea pinea etc. and that wood is not as desirable for whatever use the oaks of England were used.

I found a higher resolution version https://earthlymission.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/europe-forest-map.jpg

Reading more about this it seems that olive groves, and in Spain and Portugal, cork plantations, are being counted as forest...so that would bump up the percentage of forest cover around the Mediterranean, presumably.

I'm not hearing any discussion of climate, availability of other building materials (stone, clay for bricks, etc.), or other cultural reasons that harvesting trees may not have been the only consideration for civilization.

There are a lot of Pinus nigra across Mediterranean countries, including Pinus nigra var. calabriense...

My guesses for the reasons for the difference between the British Isles and other parts of Europe would be more intensive agriculture with lots of available water and good soils, higher population pressure, earlier industrialisation, large navy (oaks), big early wool industry, high quality building timber, more accessible and farmable terrain.

I was amazed watching the PGA Open Championship at Royal St George Golf Club in Sandwich, Eng -- there was only 1 small, scraggly tree on the entire course.

Interesting map. It's shocking to what extent the British Isles are deforested.

I used to live in Russia along the Volga and the trees are hit and miss. Vast meadows and vast areas of trees. Tree cover seemed to be about 50%. Really pleasant. BIG country there. The most interesting forest I encountered was a birch forest near Saratov, Russia. A monoculture of betula pendula.

Forest cover N America. Some plains areas and Mississippi river floodplains are agriculturally deforested. Red are urban areas.

Thanks Beng! I wish this map (well, both of them really) could distinguish between managed forests, "old growth" and "unmanaged" or whatever they call it.

In the piedmont and coastal southeast and PNW, I would hazard a guess, at least a majority of the forest is now plantation. If not a vast majority in the former. I remember when my family drove the west coast in the early 90s, somewhere in SW Washington state we saw a big billboard saying something like "this forest will be ready to harvest in 2030". The very uniform trees looked 30' tall at the time. Douglas firs I guess, thousands of acres of them. Anybody local remember those signs?

Contrast with New England, and even my corner of Maryland. The Elk Neck Peninsula was almost entirely deforested as of the prior turn of the century. (1900) However, what grew back after agriculture was out-competed by the midwest and west was just "natural", random forest succession. Same with New England AFAIK; although there are pockets of plantation there, and in eastern Canada. The Washington Post companies used to own forests in eastern Canada, paper mills, and even short line railroads...to get their newsprint!

Our local succession is pretty fast. My area was farmed since the 1780s and abandoned in the depression era, as far as I have been able to determine. Some late succession stage beeches are already about 5-6" caliper, others still seedlings...the big early colonizer maples are dying now. The ashes are dying because of EAB, of course, so that is accelerating the process. (until another blight starts killing the beeches 😞)

What’s the big swath of no trees in Illinois, Indiana and Ohio? just agricultural land? It was previously forested before european settlement, right?

Lane...my brother went to UIUC. On the drive from Chicago to Champaign, I remember seeing very few forests. There are actually plenty of trees...but they are just in isolated groups around farm houses, creek beds, etc. Here is typical scenery:

https://goo.gl/maps/KA2Vz6hn2aKAQq8G7

I think this a pattern all over the world. The best soils/lands get allocated to agriculture. Even in a country as uncrowded as Australia, there were some parts of Victoria, like SW of Ballarat, that were surprisingly free of forests. All the land was being cultivated...just not on as vast a scale as the American midwest. Sadly this is now happening in the rainforests of the Amazon basin and I think in that case it's not so much because the soil is great but it's just to meet production demand. And at least in the US as I pointed out about New England, we have had a fair amount of land once cultivated, that reverted to forest. I doubt there are many other places in the world that has happened. Anyone know of another example?

EDIT: "Breadbasket of Australia" (?) - about an hour SW of Ballarat:

I am quite sure that area would otherwise be naturally forested.

Picture I took 90 minutes later: a very happy Sequoiadendron, it surely enjoys the cool, 51F degree summer nights in Ballarat. 1500 ft in elevation, it is at the stub end of Australia's "Great Dividing Range" that runs down the east of the continent.

https://goo.gl/maps/xws2VgtdP97hkZ757

A place with winter afternoon highs cooler than Norfolk, Virginia has an all time record low of 21F/-6.3C! (All time record low for Norfolk is -3F/-19C) So, although not frequently planted, date palms will do fine:

https://goo.gl/maps/fHrYv6JSffBS9gaZ8

Much of the oak/maple/hickory/tuliptree forests in the Appalachians (and prb'ly many other east NA forests) are resprouts from previous clear-cuts. Many multi-trunked trees are the clues to that. Conifers don't resprout, and that may be part of the reason their coverage has declined, tho around here they leave a few Virginia/White pines and those reseed well enough on the cleared areas after a cut. Around/east of Charlottesville, VA start the loblolly plantations in many areas, as the soil is not good for crops but fine for the pines. Here's a chestnut oak sprout near me as an example -- that was prb'ly once a single-trunk tree (it may have been cut more than once).

LClark, I would indeed think that those areas were forested originally, but now feed us. Look at the line of forests from east Texas north -- that prb'ly went the whole way connecting to WI/MN.

But back to a question I raised - any other parts of the world once known to be extensively cleared for agriculture, that reverted to forest, like parts of New England and the Mid-Atlantic? Could this have happened in much smaller parts of Japan, possibly? With the high labor costs there one wonder if importing staples like rice can simply outweigh any advantages of growing locally. OTOH land is at such a premium there and in Europe. Somewhere in my archive I have a picture of corn/maize/"granoturco" being grown on an acre or so, inside an Italian railroad wye. (place where a line joins another line with the option to go either way) You would never see something like that in the states!

davidrt, the Mayans, in say the Yucatan had cleared large areas of those jungles for their structures and fields, and those areas have regrown and had covered over the structures (cleared now for tourism). It's speculated (judging from recently-discovered deteriorated structures) that even some now densely-jungled Amazon areas at one time had millions of people in rather large cities and had cleared surrounding areas that have grown back.

wow, interesting! I did not know that but it seems possible.

This interesting article: Atlas Obscura discusses the resurgence of forests in New England.

EDIT: link fixed

David , link is not wirking for me

Link did not work for me either but I found the article by Googling.

You see limestone walls all thru the Cumberland Valley from TN to PA. As much as clearing the fields for farming as for walls.

Yeah I think the stone walls are at a maximum in New England but radiate outwards from there with decreasing frequency, in other places that 1) had stone available and 2) had some population during colonial periods. I've spotted a few in PA & western MD.

Visit the central Kentucky Bluegrass region, where the practicing in New England with glacial rubble led to the sublime work with karst limestone.

Neat article. Thanks for sharing. some of my ancestors settled Connecticut in the 1600s. Undoubtedly some of these walls were made by them. I would love some day to try to find exactly which ones