31% of Earth, Mapped Tree by Tree

The science

A team led by Matthew Hansen at the University of Maryland published a landmark paper in Science, mapping the planet's tree cover from Landsat satellite imagery at 30-meter resolution – fine enough to see individual stands of forest. It was the first time global forest extent, loss and gain had been measured consistently, year by year, across the entire Earth.

The numbers are sobering: over a twelve-year span the world lost 2.3 million km² of forest and regained only 0.8 million. Forests still cover roughly 31% of Earth's land – just over 4 billion hectares – and host more than half of all land-based plant and animal species. This map is a snapshot of that green third of the planet.

How we turned it into a print

We encoded forest density from the satellite data into color: the deeper the green in a grid cell, the denser the canopy. The three great forest systems dominate the composition like green continents of their own – the Amazon, the Congo Basin, and the Siberian and Canadian boreal belt – while croplands and deserts read as pale gaps.

The print

From our Spectrum collection, The World as Forest is printed on premium paper in 70x50 cm and 100x70 cm. Data source: Hansen et al., High-Resolution Global Maps of 21st-Century Forest Cover Change, Science.