10 MISC. PUBLICATION 162, U. S. DEPT. OF AGRICULTURE 
timber. An additional 100,000,000 acres bear some timber, but it is 
mostly too small for sawlog production although large enough for 
cordwood. Of the remainder, some 71,000,000 acres have young 
growth in varying amounts, but there are nearly 77,000,000 acres of 
land suitable for producing commercially valuable timber that are 
now almost entirely deforested and nonproductive. All told, our 
462,000,000 million acres of commercial! forest land are growing only 
about half as much timber as they could. 
Three-fifths of our forest land, including most of the second-growth 
and denuded areas, lies east of the Great Plains. That region, how- 
ever, now contains only about one-third of all our remaining timber 
of merchantable size. The whole eastern half of the country now has 
only about as much saw timber as the 6 percent of our forest area in 
the coastal regions of Oregon and Washington. 
There are five principal forest regions in the United States—the 
northern, hardwood, southern, Rocky Mountain, and Pacific coast 
(fig. 6). In addition we have a small tropical-forest area. 
FOREST REGIONS 
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Figure 6.—Principal forest regions of the United States. 
NoRTHERN Forest REGION 
The northern forests of mixed conifers and hardwoods extend from 
the Atlantic coast through New England westward across New York 
and the upper Lake States region to the Great Plains, and southward 
from New York along the Appalachian Mountains to northern Geor- 
gia. Characteristic of the forests of this region is the mixture of 
pine, spruce, and hemlock with the hardwood types. 
In the northern part of this region the most important commercial 
trees have been the eastern white pine, hemlock, and spruce. It was 
