Illinois Turning Wood Map
Where 16 prized wood-turning species actually grow across Illinois, based on real USDA Forest Service inventory data, not folklore. Pick a species below, or click any county to see what actually grows there.
Standing volume by species
Color shows relative standing wood volume for the selected species, county by county. This is live, standing forest, not harvestable lumber ready to buy.
Volume figures come from the USDA Forest Service's Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program, real ground-surveyed forest plots, not a model or a guess. A county showing "no data" for a species means it wasn't detected in that county's sampled plots, not necessarily that none exists there at all — FIA samples on a grid, it doesn't count every tree.
Methodology
Species: 16 species commonly sought by wood turners, all confirmed present in Illinois FIA data: black walnut, butternut, black cherry, common persimmon, Osage-orange, sugar maple, boxelder, white oak, northern red oak, bur oak, shagbark hickory, American sycamore, black locust, red mulberry, American basswood, and eastern redcedar.
Volume: gross total-stem wood volume of live trees at least 1 inch d.b.h., in cubic feet, on forest land, from the most recent Illinois FIA evaluation (2024).
Geography: all 102 Illinois counties (2 have no FIA data at all and are shown as no-data).
Data pulled August 2026 via the FIADB-API.