Unprecedented wildfires raged across Russia in 2021, burning vast swaths of forest, sending smoke as far as the North Pole and unleashing astounding amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

Logging operations continued. Insect infestations wreaked havoc. The relentless expansion of agriculture, meanwhile, fueled the disappearance of critical tropical forests in Brazil and elsewhere at a rate of 10 soccer fields a minute.

Around the globe, 2021 brought more devastating losses for the world’s forests, according to a satellite-based survey by the University of Maryland and Global Forest Watch. Earth saw more than 97,500 square miles of tree cover vanish last year, an area roughly the size of Oregon.

“When we lose forests, it’s kind of like locking in emissions,” said Stephanie Roe, lead global climate scientist for the World Wildlife Fund, comparing it to building a coal plant that will emit planet-warming pollutants for decades. Roe was not involved in the Global Forest Watch analysis.

The latest findings include silver linings, however modest.

The recent figures represent a 2 percent decline compared with losses in 2020, researchers said. And in some places, such as Indonesia and Malaysia, loss of primary forests — defined as mature, native forests undisturbed in recent history — has continued to wane in recent years.

In addition, not all the losses represent permanent deforestation, especially outside the tropics.

Many of the areas that vanished in 2021, such as the boreal forests dominated by hardy spruce and pine that were burned by wildfires in Canada, Russia and the United States, are expected to grow back over time — though perhaps not soon enough to aid the world in its efforts to pull as much carbon from the atmosphere as possible.

Forested plots cut down in managed tree plantations also do not necessarily result in permanent losses.

But the latest data hardly offers cause for celebration.

Russia experienced its “worst fire season ever,” said Elizabeth Goldman, a researcher with the World Resources Institute (WRI), which launched the Global Forest Watch project 25 years ago. While such blazes are a natural part of the boreal ecosystem, “the Russian fires are particularly worrying because of Siberia’s vast peatland area and melting permafrost, both of which can release massive amounts of stored carbon when peat is dried or burned, or when permafrost melts,” she said.

This can result in feedback loops that can worsen fires and hasten climate change.

There are signs that the problem might get worse. In a recent assessment, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that human-caused emissions have significantly increased the area burned by wildfires the American West and British Columbia.

Fires have scorched growing areas in the Amazon, the Arctic, Australia and parts of Africa and Asia, the authors found. And wildfires now generate up as much as a third of all carbon emissions from the world’s forests and landscapes.

Already this spring, meanwhile, wildfires have appeared on the peatlands of Russia’s Far East and elsewhere, and the country’s federal forestry agency reported that it extinguished more than 600 fires over roughly 91,000 acres last week.