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It is generally believed that forest cover in North Korea has undergone a substantial decrease since 1980, while in South Korea, forest cover has remained relatively static during that same period of time. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Forest Resources Assessments--based on the reported forest inventories from North and South Korea--suggest a major forest cover decrease in North Korea, but only a slight decrease in South Korea during the last 30 years. In this study, we seek to check and validate those assessments by comparing them to independently derived forest cover maps compiled for three time intervals between 1990 and 2010, as well as to provide a spatially explicit view of forest cover change in the Korean Peninsula since the 1990s. We extracted tree cover data for the Korean Peninsula from existing global datasets derived from satellite imagery. Our estimates, while qualitatively supporting the FAO results, show that North Korea has lost a large number of densely forested areas, and thus in this sense has suffered heavier forest loss than the FAO assessment suggests. Given the limited time interval studied in our assessment, the overall forest loss from North Korea during the whole span of time since 1980 may have been even heavier than in our estimate. For South Korea, our results indicate that the forest cover has remained relatively stable at the national level, but that important variability in forest cover evolution exists at the regional level: While the northern and western provinces show an overall decrease in forested areas, large areas in the southeastern part of the country have increased their forest cover.

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The anatomical features of tree rings reflect information about past climatic conditions, and the variation of rainfall patterns from year to year is reflected in tree-ring width pattern. We studied the relationship between tree-ring width of teak (Tectona grandis L. f.) and weather conditions at different age classes of two distinct weather condition areas located in Bago Yoma Range, Myanmar. The sample plot was 1.0 ha of each investigated plantation and we used a computer-compatible tree-ring measuring program (Measure J2X) to measure the tree ring, and the Thornthwaite method for calculating annual moisture index. The average radial increment of 25-, 20-and 15-year-old plantations was 6.2 mm yr À1 while that of the 9-, 10-and 12-year-old plantations was 7.6 mm yr À1 . We found that the tree ring was positively correlated with the annual total rainfall in all plantations but was not significant. However, it showed coherent patterns with the chronologies of standardized tree-ring width and annual moisture index in both studied sites. Overall, young age plantations were found to be more highly affected by the changes in the annual total rainfall than older plantations by height. On the other hand, temperature was found to be related negatively to tree ring for mature stage plantations while positively for young plantations.

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