Production of Commercial Timber / Lumbering around the world is concentrated in the mid-latitude regions. Why? Explain while giving an account of spatial distribution of Commercial Timber Belts Forests around the world.

There are two major timber producing in the world viz. the temperate forest belt and other scattered in tropical and equatorial zone. The temperate forest belt encircles almost entire globe in mid latitude of northern hemisphere. This forest belt provides most of softwood timber largely used for commercial purpose and large portion of commercially used timber comes from this belt. The reasons for the concentration of commercial lumbering activities in this areas are as follows:

• Large presents of single wood species:Considerable presence of single species of trees make it easier to locate and extract the valuable type of timber.
• Mechanical extraction:Most of these areas are in developed and rich countries of Europe and Northern America, which led to modernization of forestry and use of wide ranges of machinery making it competative in global.
• Transportation;The timber can be dragged easily over the seasonally frozen ground and can be floated downstream to pulp or saw industries. Timber based industries also require water supply, so they are established near rivers, thus transporting problem is reduced as woods can be floated directly to the wood mills.
• Access to markets:Almost all the temperate forest are near major industrial areas and advanced countries where timber, paper products are in constant demand.

Another major belt of timber forest lies in the tropical and equatorial zone where major lumbering activities are carried out mainly for domestic use as fuel wood, the commercial lumbering is less due number of reasons one such major reason is unlike temperate forest, here the woods are hard and availability of variety of species which makes lumbering activity costly and difficult for commercial purpose.