Excerpt from A Descriptive Analysis of Montana's Forest Resources Montana's total area is 93 million acres. Three-fourths of these acres are the wide Open Big Sky spaces that have given rise to Montana's colorful history and image of cowboys, open range, brawling mining camps, and frontier hardships. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

This report presents a summary of the most recent Forest Inventory and Analysis summary of Montana's forests based on field data collected between 2006 and 2015. The report includes descriptive highlights and tables of area, numbers of trees, biomass, volume, growth, and mortality, as well as an industry report. Most sections and tables are organized by forest type or forest-type group, tree species group, diameter class, or owner group. Results show that Montana's forest land covers 25.9 million acres, of which 7 million acres (27 percent) are privately owned, and 15.5 million acres (60 percent) are administered by the USDA Forest Service. The State's most abundant forest type is Douglas-fir, which covers more than 7.5 million acres. Lodgepole pine is the most abundant tree species by number of trees 5.0 inches or greater in diameter, and Douglas-fir is the most abundant by volume and biomass. Montana's forests contain 42 billion cubic feet of net volume in trees 5.0 inches diameter and larger. Montana had a negative mean annual net growth of all live trees 5.0 inches diameter at -54 million cubic feet per year over the report's evaluation period (2006-2015).