A 300-year-old map shows that China’s entire forest system has basically packed up and moved from the southwest to the northeast.
April 13, 2026
Original Paper
New reconstruction of China's spatio-temporal forest since 1700
SSRN · 6561249
The Takeaway
By reconstructing three centuries of data, researchers found that the nation's "lungs" hit an all-time low in 1960. This map corrects the historical record on how and where nature has been recovering across the country.
From the abstract
Reconstructing long-term forest distribution is crucial for understanding land-use change and ecosystem carbon cycles. This study proposes a novel historical forest reconstruction method that integrates ground survey and remote sensing information to address the limitations of existing statistical methods in spatial characterization and the difficulty of remote sensing in capturing long-term dynamics. The method integrates multisource remote sensing products to construct forest occurrence possib