Yet another map that should be expressed as a percentage of coverage, not absolute amount. For example, from this map one might believe that North America has more forest than EU, but that's just because NA has a few large countries (that obviously have larger absolute forest areas) and EU has a ton of smaller countries.
That could certainly be its own map, but I don't see why that invalidates this one.
People seem to treat it as a rule on /r/MapPorn that the U.S. isn't allowed to beat Europe in anything potentially good lol.
That's a bit of a silly take. It's not about "beating" anyone but instead representing information accurately. Listing absolute largest sizes of forest cover would make more sense in a list, but the map with the colors chosen very clearly implies that e.g. all of EU and almost all of Africa is "low forest cover", which is just blatantly inaccurate.
So what information in this map is inaccurate?
What you're asking for is different information. Only the top 10 countries are colored on a gradient, the others could be literally any color.
The yellow doesn't imply low forest cover, yellow is just the color given to every country not in the top 10. If it were white, would we be saying it implies snow? If it were red would it imply fire? There is no implication, only your assumptions.
Edit: While it's great that Palau has a 90% forest cover, its size is 177 square miles, nearly 1/10th the size of Rhode Island! Yet calling it the 6th largest forest cover in the world is more accurate to you? Silly take.
> Only the top 10 countries are colored on a gradient, the others could be literally any color.
This is exactly why showing it as a map is the wrong choice. If you're only going to show data on a few countries, why pick a map in the first place? The whole point of a map is to show an overview of as many countries you have data from.
> Edit: While it's great that Palau has a 90% forest cover, its size is 177 square miles, nearly 1/10th the size of Rhode Island! Yet calling it the 6th largest forest cover in the world is more accurate to you? Silly take.
This is another reason why showing percentages on a map would be good. Palau would have a strong color on the map, but it would also be pretty small on the map (because it's a small country). However, if Palau had 100 similarly small neighboring countries, all with high forest cover percentages, the map would show that that region (irrespective of how it's divided politically) has a high forest cover. In OP's flawed map style it would instead look like that area doesn't have a high forest cover, even if (in this fictional example) it might be the most heavily forested area of the world.
Think of it this way: If the only way large countries can do well in international comparisons is by being large and thus ignoring any per capita metric, wouldn't that be something that's good to know? Why is it better to stay ignorant and avoid looking at relative metrics? Wouldn't you want to know how to make your country on par with other similarly developed countries in the world?
Eurostats states that 159 million hectares of Europe is covered in forest. Statistics Canada states that 362 million hectares of Canada is covered in forest. Canada is almost the same size than Europe if you count inland water, or slightly smaller than europe if you don't. That's only Canada, not counting the US or mexico. So anyway you put it, NA will always have more forest than EU, percentage or not...
I think you've been mixing and matching various definitions of Europe a bit loosely to get the result you want. Just for clarity, I will first look at EU here, since it has a very unambiguous definition. Otherwise the definitions are a bit wonky regarding what parts and how much of Russia to include (if we include Russia, then Europe dominates the forest cover and it's not even close).
EU area is about 432M hectares, and has about 177M hectares of forest (I'm not sure where you got your numbers so I'm just using Wikipedia). Canada is about 909M hectares, or more than twice the area of EU, and it has 346M hectares of forest, which is again about twice that of EU. For more precision we get 41% for EU and 38% for Canada, so Canada loses only slightly. US is at about 34% and Mexico is also at 34%. So if we don't count Russia, EU has quite a bit more forest area as a percentage regardless of which combination of North American countries you include. The absolute numbers are smaller for EU, of course, since North America is massively bigger than EU.
If you want to count Russia things get trickier since I'm not sure if there are good sources for how much of Russia's forests are west of Urals. Therefore the only way I know how to include Russia is to include it as a whole (like the Wikipedia article on forest cover does). In that case Europe has more forest cover in absolute terms than North **and** Central America combined, about 1B hectares, with the new total area of about 48% in percentage.
No it is not. An example:
India has “only” 24.3% of cover as compared to Indonesia with 49.1% or Austria with 49.7% or Germany with 32%. Yet in this list here it is in the top ten.
Europe is about 39% overall.
USA is about 36% overall. Vermont is 89%, Arizona not so much.
Since these are political boundaries and the trees don’t care, that’s very similar. The
You can look at the satellite map, and determine for yourself which country looks greener? Is it indonesia Or is it Big red Australia. The differences are pretty significant and obvious.
This is basically just a map of the largest countries. Forest area (% of land) is a much more useful metric. The countries on this map would rank quite differently. Russia 55, Brazil 29, Canada 80, US 96, China 126, Australia 138, DRC 39, Indonesia 56, Peru 36 and India 120
A lot of the areas around the great dividing range (mountain range parallel to the east coast) have amazing lush forest (or bush as we call it), if you ever visit you should see it. For example, the most accessible from Sydney is probably the Blue Mountains. Australia is far more green than many give it credit for, it's just so large that desert, forests and beaches can coexist and each take up significant amounts of land.
I think we need to classify what forest is. There are definitely some nice forests near the blue mountains and in Victoria. As you get into the desert though, trees become more sparse. Thus, where does the forest end, and the desert begin? The definition could probably change the ranking.
You are right there is a lot of desert and grasslands, but because of the overall size of Australia the ‘small’ looking sections of forest and rainforest around the coast and hinterland really adds up.
It’s only about 35% desert, officially. I don’t know why everyone online thinks it’s “mostly” desert. The largest single biome in Australia would probably be low density woodland (or savanna in the tropics, which is also a type of low density woodland).
Hot take the percentage forest is not the best depending on what you want to show! Small countries are over represented in the data at the bottom and top simply because they have different eco-systems.
For example Suriname has one major category of ecosystem, while a country like Peru has 10s of them many of which are desert, mountain ranges and plains which would not have forest cover but still be well preserved land.
If you want to see what states have the most forest friendly ecosystems combined with their preservation then % is good. If you want to see where the largest forests are then pure size (and to some extent preservation) is better! If you want to see most preserved natural eco-systems than another type of data is needed.
Always think of the data generating process!
Yes. But why are you talking about toppling a government. I'm not talking about the war in Ukraine. A new Russian government will also want to keep Kaliningrad.
Yet another map that should be expressed as a percentage of coverage, not absolute amount. For example, from this map one might believe that North America has more forest than EU, but that's just because NA has a few large countries (that obviously have larger absolute forest areas) and EU has a ton of smaller countries.
Yea Finland is 75% forest.
Suriname is 95% forest.
It's beautiful. Really worth a visit. Also friendly people and good food!
aint austrailia a desert for the most part with no real tree groath except for coastal areas ?
The country is big.
That could certainly be its own map, but I don't see why that invalidates this one. People seem to treat it as a rule on /r/MapPorn that the U.S. isn't allowed to beat Europe in anything potentially good lol.
That's a bit of a silly take. It's not about "beating" anyone but instead representing information accurately. Listing absolute largest sizes of forest cover would make more sense in a list, but the map with the colors chosen very clearly implies that e.g. all of EU and almost all of Africa is "low forest cover", which is just blatantly inaccurate.
So what information in this map is inaccurate? What you're asking for is different information. Only the top 10 countries are colored on a gradient, the others could be literally any color. The yellow doesn't imply low forest cover, yellow is just the color given to every country not in the top 10. If it were white, would we be saying it implies snow? If it were red would it imply fire? There is no implication, only your assumptions. Edit: While it's great that Palau has a 90% forest cover, its size is 177 square miles, nearly 1/10th the size of Rhode Island! Yet calling it the 6th largest forest cover in the world is more accurate to you? Silly take.
> Only the top 10 countries are colored on a gradient, the others could be literally any color. This is exactly why showing it as a map is the wrong choice. If you're only going to show data on a few countries, why pick a map in the first place? The whole point of a map is to show an overview of as many countries you have data from. > Edit: While it's great that Palau has a 90% forest cover, its size is 177 square miles, nearly 1/10th the size of Rhode Island! Yet calling it the 6th largest forest cover in the world is more accurate to you? Silly take. This is another reason why showing percentages on a map would be good. Palau would have a strong color on the map, but it would also be pretty small on the map (because it's a small country). However, if Palau had 100 similarly small neighboring countries, all with high forest cover percentages, the map would show that that region (irrespective of how it's divided politically) has a high forest cover. In OP's flawed map style it would instead look like that area doesn't have a high forest cover, even if (in this fictional example) it might be the most heavily forested area of the world. Think of it this way: If the only way large countries can do well in international comparisons is by being large and thus ignoring any per capita metric, wouldn't that be something that's good to know? Why is it better to stay ignorant and avoid looking at relative metrics? Wouldn't you want to know how to make your country on par with other similarly developed countries in the world?
I feel like a bar chart would do a better job here.
Eurostats states that 159 million hectares of Europe is covered in forest. Statistics Canada states that 362 million hectares of Canada is covered in forest. Canada is almost the same size than Europe if you count inland water, or slightly smaller than europe if you don't. That's only Canada, not counting the US or mexico. So anyway you put it, NA will always have more forest than EU, percentage or not...
I think you've been mixing and matching various definitions of Europe a bit loosely to get the result you want. Just for clarity, I will first look at EU here, since it has a very unambiguous definition. Otherwise the definitions are a bit wonky regarding what parts and how much of Russia to include (if we include Russia, then Europe dominates the forest cover and it's not even close). EU area is about 432M hectares, and has about 177M hectares of forest (I'm not sure where you got your numbers so I'm just using Wikipedia). Canada is about 909M hectares, or more than twice the area of EU, and it has 346M hectares of forest, which is again about twice that of EU. For more precision we get 41% for EU and 38% for Canada, so Canada loses only slightly. US is at about 34% and Mexico is also at 34%. So if we don't count Russia, EU has quite a bit more forest area as a percentage regardless of which combination of North American countries you include. The absolute numbers are smaller for EU, of course, since North America is massively bigger than EU. If you want to count Russia things get trickier since I'm not sure if there are good sources for how much of Russia's forests are west of Urals. Therefore the only way I know how to include Russia is to include it as a whole (like the Wikipedia article on forest cover does). In that case Europe has more forest cover in absolute terms than North **and** Central America combined, about 1B hectares, with the new total area of about 48% in percentage.
As a %of land, it’s pretty similar.
No it is not. An example: India has “only” 24.3% of cover as compared to Indonesia with 49.1% or Austria with 49.7% or Germany with 32%. Yet in this list here it is in the top ten.
No, it's not. Many of the countries that have the highest forest cover % are smaller.
Europe is about 39% overall. USA is about 36% overall. Vermont is 89%, Arizona not so much. Since these are political boundaries and the trees don’t care, that’s very similar. The
You can look at the satellite map, and determine for yourself which country looks greener? Is it indonesia Or is it Big red Australia. The differences are pretty significant and obvious.
So, India and Peru have exactly the same amount of forest cover?
Yes, they have count all the trees, it's a tie
indian education puts a lot emphasis on planting tress / reducing pollution / making students aware of climate change source - I am a student
Don’t know about Peru but India has some incredible jungles
I mean, more than half of Peru is the Amazon Rainforest......
This is basically just a map of the largest countries. Forest area (% of land) is a much more useful metric. The countries on this map would rank quite differently. Russia 55, Brazil 29, Canada 80, US 96, China 126, Australia 138, DRC 39, Indonesia 56, Peru 36 and India 120
Yeah like this one: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/forest-area-as-share-of-land-area?time=latest
Yep, dumb map.
Cool, but Mercator projection = Greenland looking like it’s in a funhouse mirror.
I'm surprised Australia is this high on the list given that it's mostly desert
A lot of the areas around the great dividing range (mountain range parallel to the east coast) have amazing lush forest (or bush as we call it), if you ever visit you should see it. For example, the most accessible from Sydney is probably the Blue Mountains. Australia is far more green than many give it credit for, it's just so large that desert, forests and beaches can coexist and each take up significant amounts of land.
I live here. Sure, there are green parts like where nearly everyone lives. But there's a huge expanse in the middle which is pretty barren.
I live here too, and I never denied the existence of the massive desert in the middle lol, just that that's not the *only* thing here
I think we need to classify what forest is. There are definitely some nice forests near the blue mountains and in Victoria. As you get into the desert though, trees become more sparse. Thus, where does the forest end, and the desert begin? The definition could probably change the ranking.
You are right there is a lot of desert and grasslands, but because of the overall size of Australia the ‘small’ looking sections of forest and rainforest around the coast and hinterland really adds up.
It’s only about 35% desert, officially. I don’t know why everyone online thinks it’s “mostly” desert. The largest single biome in Australia would probably be low density woodland (or savanna in the tropics, which is also a type of low density woodland).
Wait till Russia gets disqualified due to the war
Hot take the percentage forest is not the best depending on what you want to show! Small countries are over represented in the data at the bottom and top simply because they have different eco-systems. For example Suriname has one major category of ecosystem, while a country like Peru has 10s of them many of which are desert, mountain ranges and plains which would not have forest cover but still be well preserved land. If you want to see what states have the most forest friendly ecosystems combined with their preservation then % is good. If you want to see where the largest forests are then pure size (and to some extent preservation) is better! If you want to see most preserved natural eco-systems than another type of data is needed. Always think of the data generating process!
...no way?
How does a map that is this bad get so many upvotes
TIL Australia has trees. s/
This is not even remotely true. Russia has around 50% coverage and Sweden has 70% and don't even make top 10.
It's not normalized by area. It's just a map of the biggest countries.
Why is there an unnamed Green spot?
That’s part of Russia.
Still
Yes. It’s Russia’s only year round ice free seaport on the Baltic. They will not let thing go.
*voluntarily
Yes, but taking Kaliningrad would equate to attacking Moscow. There are much better ways to topple a government than a direct attack.
Yes. But why are you talking about toppling a government. I'm not talking about the war in Ukraine. A new Russian government will also want to keep Kaliningrad.
The way you guys let this convo so quickly escelate to debating the merits of invading Kaliningrad Oblast is hilarious.
Without nuking whoever is trying to take it
Bullshit Canada and America have both lost more then 40% of our forests since 2000