In honor of The Lorax being released today on DVD let’s look at another tree cover study from the United States Forest Service (USFS) because they speak for the trees all day every day.

In February a study by the USFS estimated that the tree cover in urban parts of the country was declining at four million trees per year.

Even at that astonishing rate (for urban areas at least) the USFS released a study a few months later that says the tree cover in the contiguous 48 states is at 659 million acres. That means over one-third of the nation is shaded by glorious trees or other impervious cover.

The study by Dave Nowak and Eric Greenfield, the same two USFS researchers who studied the urban tree cover decline, was published in a journal called Landscape and Urban Planning.

The urban area with the most tree cover is Connecticut with 67 percent and the lowest is Nevada with a dismal 10 percent.

Now onto the states, all clustered next to each other on the East Coast, with more tree cover than you can shake a stick at: New Hampshire (State Motto: Live Free or Die) leads the nation in tree cover with a whopping 89 percent across its 9,304 square miles.

Followed by Maine 83 percent, and Vermont one percent behind with 82 percent.  Both the flags of Maine and Vermont  have pine trees on them as testament to their glorious heritage and stewardship of forests. The flags are almost identical in this and many other respects.

The three states with the lowest percentage of tree cover are not the states you would guess-none of them are desert states. The Great Plains have plenty of sky and grassland suitable for farming and cattle stretching for miles but scarcely any trees.

North Dakota has the lowest percentage of tree cover at 3 percent, slowly creeping upwards is Nebraska with 4 percent and South Dakota at 6 percent.

“This research demonstrates how natural environments in concert with how we develop and manage communities significantly impacts tree cover in urban areas,” said Nowak. “Cover data of a city or region can provide a baseline for developing management plans, setting tree cover goals, and for monitoring change through time, all of which are essential to sustaining urban forests.”

These statistics will either become far more depressing or relieving depending on what affects the recent heat waves, wildfires, and myriad beetles will eventually have on our forests.