As cities and suburbs mushroomed, North Carolina's forest cover shrank in the past decade to its lowest level since the 1930s, statistics released Wednesday show.

Unlike the post-Depression years, when forests gradually began to overtake old farm fields, the 21st century promises no such recovery.

"The land can recover from the worst forestry," said Arthur Cooper, a forestry professor emeritus at N.C. State University, "but it can never recover from concrete."

Less forest means shrinking cover for wildlife, reduced cleansing of waterways and increased odds that the views from new subdivisions will be of other subdivisions.

Previous studies have predicted the state will continue to lose forest acreage, said Will McDow, a forest economist for the advocacy group Environmental Defense.

"Whether this is because a forester isn't managing his land correctly or because of sprawl ... these trees are not going to come back," he said.

The report released Wednesday by the U.S. Forest Service summarizes the average annual rates of forest growth, harvests and mortality between 1990 and 2002.

Hardest hit were the urban counties, including those around Charlotte, Raleigh and Winston-Salem. Mecklenburg lost 35 percent of its forests, more than any other county.

Statewide, the N.C. forests lost more than 1 million acres, covering 18.3 million acres by 2002.

Some forestry experts found reassurance in the new figures.

"It's not all a Wal-Mart parking lot," said Barry New, a data analyst with the N.C. Division of Forest Resources.

"We still have a significant forest resource in the state, even though we lost a million acres of it. Overall, when you look at growth and removal, we're at a sustainable level."

For the first time since the periodic forest inventories began in 1938, harvests of softwoods -- mostly pine trees -- in the 1990s exceeded their growth rate..

Pine harvests grew 42 percent, the report said, exceeding annual growth by 17 percent.

The percentage of pine cut from quick-growing planted stands, which environmentalists dislike, more than doubled. But foresters say those figures don't count the large number of young pines, less than 6 inches in diameter, that are too small to be counted as growing stock.

Hardwood removals increased 8 percent, but the growth rate was 21 percent higher.

The volume of timber harvests rose 30 percent since 1990, an Environmental Defense analysis said.

About three-fourths of N.C. forest acreage is held by private owners, the wild cards in forestry's future. Many would rather look at their trees than sell them to companies that will cut them.