Forest coverage of 40%? It doesn't look like that when I drive around the country.
Much of the DR isn't frequented by most people. In fact, most of the population lives concentrated (including high and medium density rural areas) in about 15% of the territory and most spend most of their lives not travelling through thatb15% in its entirety. When most people travel from one region to another, they are going through mostly concentrated areas as most people that travel say from Puerto Plata to Santiago take the highway via Navarrete/Maimón. The busiest highway in the country is the Duarte Highway from Santiago to Santo Domingo. When all the msjor highways are taken into account, a very small part of the country is visible and most of that isn't forested. In fact, much of them have quite a population giving the impression that in many areas the countryside is "full," yet it isn't.
Case in point, no one (or almost no one) in this forum would equate with the DR with pine trees, yet the DR has the largest unbroken pine forest in the Caribbean. Most of that is in the Central Mountains, much of it not visible from any road and plenty of people live their entire lives in the DR and will never see them. Yet, there it is. The particular area covered in unbroken pine forest is bigger than many islands and maybe cover two-thirds of Puerto Rico or Jamaica, maybe even more. To make it more relatable, that would be about two-thirds of the entire eastern DR. Think from Punta Cana to about Hato Mayor, all of that including all the coasts, sugar csne fields, cattle ranches, etc covered in an unbroken and thick pine forest. Anyone that spends all of their time say in the Cibao Valley and on the North Coast would never see that.
What is debatable is the notion that forest cover is 40% when, in fact, not too long ago it was reported that forest cover reached 51%. The is only one of two places in the Caribbean with forest growth (the other is Cuba.) Much of that is in parts of the Cibao and of the South. Anyone that judges the DR based on forest cover in the East will get the wrong idea for the whole country.
In Puerto Rico, at the beginning of the 20th century forest cover was extremely low since it was the least forest Caribbean island of the ones originally covered in forest. Today, after years of planting trees, forest cover has increased to about 54% and has remain stable for msny years.
Del 2005 al 2015 la República Dominicana aumentó su cobertura boscosa de un 46 a un 51 por ciento, de acuerdo al Inventario Nacional Forestal de RD,
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