Rural Communities Are Losing More Forests Than Urban Ones

The author Richard Louv coined the term "nature deficit disorder" to describe the damage to individual and societal development when kids don't go out into the natural world to play. Since he wrote that in 2005, however, Americans have moved even further away from the forest's edge.

A new study conducted by scientists from the College of Environmental Science and Forestry in New York found that Americans, on average, live 14 percent farther from forests than they did in 1990, because of deforestation. Even more startling, however, is that this forest loss occurs at a much higher rate in rural areas and public lands than it does in urbanized or private landscapes.

And while the change only represents about a third of a mile—not insuperable for most people who want to reach nature—that distance is significant for wildlife living in an already chopped up landscape and can have consequences for other ecosystems. Their findings are published in the journal PLOS ONE.

If you've ever looked out the window of a plane on a cross country flight you'll notice that vast stretches of connected, undisturbed wilderness are a rarity in the continental United States of the 21st Century. Most "forested" areas, even in rural spaces, are like checkerboards, divided by roads, fields and fences.

While a patchy island landscape presents its own set of challenges for plants and animals, forest patches still, however, provide important ecoservices that wildlife depend upon for survival. Migrating birds, for example, rely on forest patches for food and shelter while traversing great distances over an otherwise human landscape.

"You can think of the forests as little islands that the birds are hopping from one to the next," said ecologist and co-author Giorgos Mountrakis in a public statement.

Mountrakis, along with co-author Sheng Yang, pooled together satellite images of forests from across the entire US, taken between 1990 and 2000, and calculated the average distance that forest edges had receded over time. They found that rural areas—particularly on or near public lands—experienced substantially greater amounts of forest loss than areas of urban sprawl and private land, especially in the west.

The reason for this trend is not entirely clear but there are likely a suite of factors at play. In urbanized areas, for example, forests are conspicuous and usually heavily protected. But the public eye doesn't go far beyond the city or town edge. "Because the urban forests tend to receive much more attention, they are better protected," said co-author Sheng Yang in a public statement.

Urban forests, unlike rural and public lands, also don't have to contend with the pollution and clear cutting that comes with resource extraction from the insatiable fossil fuel and lumber industries.

"The public perceives the urbanized and private lands as more vulnerable, but that's not what our study showed," said Mountrakis. "Rural areas are at a higher risk of losing these forested patches."

The Trump administration's aggressive desire to open up more and more public lands for drilling and mining doesn't bode well for forests. A flurry of rollbacks and attacks on various environmental rules protecting public lands are already under way.  And it will impact water, soil, and the quality of human life.

"If you are in the western US or you are in a rural area or you are in land owned by a public entity, it could be federal, state or local, your distance to the forest is increasing much faster than the other areas," said Mountrakis. "The forests are getting further away from you."