Reforestation
natural or intentional restocking of existing forests and woodlands that have been depleted
Reforestation is the practice of restoring previously existing forests and woodlands that have been destroyed or damaged. The prior forest destruction might have happened through deforestation, clearcutting or wildfires. Three important purposes of reforestation programs are for harvesting of wood, for climate change mitigation, and for ecosystem and habitat restoration purposes. One method of reforestation is to establish tree plantations, also called plantation forests. They cover about 131 million ha worldwide, which is 3% of the global forest area and 45% of the total area of planted forests.
Globally, planted forests increased from 4.1% to 7.0% of the total forest area between 1990 and 2015. Plantation forests made up 280 million ha (hectare) in 2015, an increase of about 40 million ha in the previous ten years. Of the planted forests worldwide, 18% of that area consists of exotic or introduced species while the rest consist of species native to the country where they are planted.
There are limitations and challenges with reforestation projects, especially if they are in the form of tree plantations. Firstly, there can be competition with other land uses and displacement risk.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Reforestation” is natural or intentional restocking of existing forests and woodlands that have been depleted. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Reforestation, natural and intentional, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “natural or intentional restocking of existing forests and woodlands that have been depleted” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q815818. The Library of Congress control number is sh85112223. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1990 and 2015.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Reforestation” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.