Forest Facts: 15 Things Worth Knowing About Woods and Forests

Forests are one of those things everyone recognises and almost nobody can define. Ask a group of children what a forest is and you’ll get “lots of trees”, which is right, but leaves a lot out.

We’ve pulled together fifteen forest facts that we’ve found go down well with children, teachers and anyone who likes knowing slightly odd things about the outdoors. Some are big global numbers, some are closer to home.

Where a fact comes from a particular source, we’ve said so, so you can check it or dig further.

Forest facts about the world

1. About a third of the planet’s land is forest. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) puts the figure at 4.14 billion hectares, or 32% of global land area, in its Global Forest Resources Assessment 2025.

2. That works out at about half a hectare of forest for every person on Earth, according to the same FAO report. Half a hectare is roughly the size of a football pitch, minus a bit.

3. Nearly half of the world’s forests are in the tropics. The rest are spread across temperate regions like ours and the cold boreal forests of the far north.

4. Deforestation is slowing, but hasn’t stopped. FAO figures show it dropped from 17.6 million hectares a year in the 1990s to 10.9 million hectares a year between 2015 and 2025. That’s still an area bigger than Scotland every single year, which is a sobering thing to work out with older children.

5. Most forests grew on their own. FAO says naturally regenerating forests make up 92% of the world’s forest area, with planted forests making up the remaining 8%.

Forest facts about the UK

6. The UK has about 3.29 million hectares of woodland. Forest Research, which produces the official forestry statistics, says that’s around 13.5% of the UK’s land.

7. That’s well below the global average. Forest Research’s 2025 figures show Scotland is the most wooded part of the UK at around 19%, with England at around 10%.

8. New woods are still being planted. Forest Research reports around 15,580 hectares of new woodland created in the UK in 2024/25.

9. “Ancient woodland” has a specific meaning. In England, Wales and Northern Ireland, it’s land that has been continuously wooded since at least 1600, according to the Woodland Trust. In Scotland the cut-off date is 1750, because that’s when reliable maps start to be available.

10. The UK has two native oaks. They’re the English or pedunculate oak (Quercus robur) and the sessile oak (Quercus petraea), and telling them apart is a good acorn-hunting challenge, since English oak acorns hang on long stalks and sessile oak acorns don’t.

11. A single species of tree can support thousands of others. A study led by the James Hutton Institute listed around 2,300 species associated with native oaks, from insects and birds to fungi and lichens, with more than 300 of them found only on oak.

Forest facts about words and history

12. “Forest” didn’t always mean trees. In medieval England, a forest was a legal area set aside for royal hunting, governed by its own strict forest law. It could include heath, farmland and villages as well as woods.

13. The New Forest is a good example. It was declared a royal forest by William the Conqueror in around 1079, and much of it is heathland rather than woodland, which still confuses first-time visitors.

14. Forest and woodland have formal definitions. The FAO defines forest as land of more than 0.5 hectares with trees taller than 5 metres and more than 10% canopy cover. In the UK, the official woodland statistics use a similar 0.5 hectare minimum, with at least 20% canopy cover.

15. Under those definitions, a wood can be surprisingly small. Half a hectare is about the size of a large school playing field, so the patch of trees behind the school may well count.

Using forest facts with children

A list of facts is a starting point, not a lesson. When we ran forest school, the facts that stuck were the ones children could connect to something in front of them.

A few ways we’d recommend using these:

• Fact hunt: write facts on cards, hide them around a wood, and have children find them and read them aloud
• True or false: read out a mix of real forest facts and invented ones, and have children run to one side or the other depending on whether they think it’s true or false. This is a good forest school warm up game.
• Measure it: pace out half a hectare, or a smaller part of it, so the numbers mean something
• Oak survey: find an oak and count how many different living things you can spot on it in ten minutes
• Map it: compare an old map of your local area with a current one and look for woods that have appeared or disappeared

Older children can also use the FAO and Forest Research figures for simple maths. Percentages, area conversions and comparing countries all work well with real data.