National Forest

National Forest may refer to:

See also

Chippewa National Forest

Chippewa National Forest is a National Forest located in northcentral Minnesota, United States, in the counties of Itasca, Cass, and Beltrami. Forest headquarters are located in Cass Lake, Minnesota. There are local ranger district offices in Blackduck, Deer River, and Walker.

History and geography

The forest covers 666,623 acres (2,697.73 km²). Water is abundant, with over 1,300 lakes (including Leech Lake), 923 miles (1,485 km) of rivers and streams, and 400,000 acres (1,600 km²) of wetlands.

The forest was established as the Minnesota Forest Reserve on June 27, 1902, with passage of the Morris Act. While this act mainly addressed the disposition of unallotted lands on Ojibwe Indian reservations in Minnesota, 200,000 acres (810 km²) of the Chippewas of the Mississippi, Cass Lake, Leech Lake, and Winnibigoshish Indian reservations were designated as a Forest Reserve.

The Reserve was re-established as the Minnesota National Forest on May 23, 1908. In 1928 the forest was renamed in honor of the Chippewa Indians from whose land the forest was created. Subsequent boundary expansions and land purchases increased the area of the forest to its present size. Today, approximately 75 percent of the forest's land is within the Leech Lake Indian Reservation.

Forest

A forest is a large area of land covered with trees or other woody vegetation. Hundreds of more precise definitions of forest are used throughout the world, incorporating factors such as tree density, tree height, land use, legal standing and ecological function. According to the widely used United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization definition, forests covered an area of four billion hectares (15 million square miles) or approximately 30 percent of the world's land area in 2006.

Forests are the dominant terrestrial ecosystem of Earth, and are distributed across the globe. Forests account for 75% of the gross primary productivity of the Earth's biosphere, and contain 80% of the Earth's plant biomass.

Forests at different latitudes form distinctly different ecozones: boreal forests near the poles tend to consist of evergreens, while tropical forests near the equator tend to be distinct from the temperate forests at mid-latitude. The amount of precipitation and the elevation of the forest also affects forest composition.

Forest service

Forest Service may refer to: