Monitoring deforestation

Here is an article that reports a new technique for measuring the state of the world's forests has been developed, and shows the future may not be as bad as previously feared.

Here are some interesting forest facts:

Forests cover 30% of the world's total land area
Deforestation rate: 13m hectares per year
Iceland has three native tree species, Brazil has 7,780
The world's trees store 283 gigatonnes of carbon, 50% more than there is in the atmosphere