[emn13]

I'd be careful drawing too many conclusions from that dataset. Many if not most forests are managed and logged; not all of that logging is necessarily on the public books nor does it imply complete deforestation; Legal logging typically requires a certain amount of regrowth to satisfy regulations (whether national or to satisfy carbon offsets). However, a sapling is not equivalent to a centuries old giant. Some afforestation targets permit a very, very low tree cover to be considered wooded. And if trees are being replanted; how is biodiversity doing? People have a tendency to pick cheap solutions (which is perfectly reasonable!), but that also means we should be careful we don't misinterpret simplistic coverage metrics as saying more than they do.

I looked (quickly, and therefore poorly, I'm sure), but I couldn't see anything in the ourworldindata sources that tries to distinguish the quality of forest left. I'm likely missing something, admittedly; I'll keep looking, if I find a link to their methodology I'll post an update.

They seem to be gather data from the UN FAO forestry project, and also other sources. I still haven't found any in those sources that account for the size of the trees; but ourworldindata does indirectly include some evidence that size may have reduced - the UN FAO source estimates forest coverage has dropped by almost exactly a third; but the tree number (where tree is defined as being 10cm in diamater at breast height) has fallen by almost half. However, since the sources use wildly different methodologies, I'm sure there might be other causes for the discrepancy, but in any case - it still highlights that interpreting these numbers isn't entirely trivial.

(Incidently, the same caveats likely hold for the globalforestwatch.org site; there too it's not obvious what they're actually measuring, nor how well they can do that, nor how close whatever metric they've got aligns with whatever you actually care about.)

[loganbyers]

I agree context and intricacies are everything. On your point about GFW, I know the team is very conscious and attentive to communicating what the data means.

This link might be helpful: https://www.globalforestwatch.org/help/map/faqs/

[emn13]

Thanks for the link; that's helpful. It also confirms that the worry that indeed it's quite tricky to interpret this data; even with the best of intentions errors are quite plausible.

It's still interesting, it just means we should see these efforts as narrow, potentially distorted perspectives on the ground truth; and therefore we need to remain open to the fact that other reasonable perspectives might show different trends.