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Data

Forest area

About this data

Forest area
Forest area is land under natural or planted stands of trees of at least 5 meters in situ, whether productive or not, and excludes tree stands in agricultural production systems.
Source
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (2025) – with major processing by Our World in Data
Last updated
December 5, 2025
Next expected update
December 2026
Date range
1990–2025
Unit
hectares

Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations – Global Forest Resources Assessment

Retrieved on
December 5, 2025
Retrieved from
https://www.fao.org/forest-resources-assessment/en
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. 2025. Global Forest Resources Assessment 2025. Rome.
Retrieved on
December 5, 2025
Retrieved from
https://www.fao.org/forest-resources-assessment/en
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. 2025. Global Forest Resources Assessment 2025. Rome.

How we process data at Our World in Data

All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.

At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.

Read about our data pipeline
Notes on our processing step for this indicator

Annual forest area values are linearly interpolated for missing years, based on available data points from the FAO Forest Resources Assessment (FRA) reports.

Reuse this work

  • All data produced by third-party providers and made available by Our World in Data are subject to the license terms from the original providers. Our work would not be possible without the data providers we rely on, so we ask you to always cite them appropriately (see below). This is crucial to allow data providers to continue doing their work, enhancing, maintaining and updating valuable data.
  • All data, visualizations, and code produced by Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited.

Citations

How to cite this page

To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:

“Data Page: Forest area”, part of the following publication: Hannah Ritchie, Fiona Spooner, and Max Roser (2021) - “Forests and Deforestation”. Data adapted from Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Retrieved from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260430-105303/grapher/forest-area-km.html [online resource] (archived on April 30, 2026).

How to cite this data

In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (2025) – with major processing by Our World in Data

Full citation

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (2025) – with major processing by Our World in Data. “Forest area” [dataset]. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, “Global Forest Resources Assessment 2025” [original data]. Retrieved April 30, 2026 from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260430-105303/grapher/forest-area-km.html (archived on April 30, 2026).

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