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I made this by taking a satellite image and editing it on GIMP to increase the contrast. Generally speaking the dark green areas are forested, though some (not all) of the lighter green areas are also lightly wooded, just not at a sufficient enough density with a canopy to count as a "forest".
What's interesting to me is how little forest the West has outside of the coastal Northwest and northern Rockies of northern Idaho and Western Montana. Wyoming, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona and Colorado are mostly devoid of trees like Nevada except in the altitude belts of mountain ranges where it's wet enough and not too cold for tree growth.
Excluding the Northwest Coast and Northern Rockies bastions I'd wager that only 10 to 15 percent of the western US is forested, and with their inclusion maybe 25 percent of the region.
Who is seriously shocked that an area of the country that consists of mostly desert doesnt have dense forests?
I think everyone knows the Southwest is arid. What's surprising perhaps is that most of the Northwest is either semi-arid scrub or high prairie too. People have this image of everything between the Pacific and Dakotas as being chock full of salmon, trees, and snowcapped mountains but it's really only modestly sized parts that are actually like that. Most of it looks like western Nebraska.
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