I grew up around the flat prairies of Nebraska and South Dakota and although I didn’t notice it at the time, much of the space was without trees. Yes, there were maple, spruce, oak and sycamore trees, but they were mostly in the towns and cities. Each farm/ranch would usually have a tree line that protected the homestead from the severe Nebraska winters but other than these ‘planted trees’ the numbers of trees is quite sparse. I really notice a difference when we moved to Indiana.
Most natural tree lines are found along the rivers in the state and the trees lines aren’t very deep. If you’re in Nebraska looking for a creek or river, just go to the trees.
J. Sterling Morton founded Arbor Day in Nebraska City in 1872. It is said that over one million trees were planted in a single day. Arbor is Latin for ‘tree’.
One interesting note is that Nebraska does have a National Forest pretty much in the middle of the Sandhills. That’s right, a forest! But… And that’s a big but… The forest is 100% man made.
Nebraska National Forest was established in 1902 by Charles E. Bessey because he believed the area to have once had a natural forest and as an experiment to see if forests could be recreated in treeless areas of the Great Plains for use as a national timber reserve. The result was a 20,000-acre forest, the largest human-planted forest in the United States. Today the forest’s nursery supplies 2.5 to 3 million seedlings per year.
Here you can see the green in the land of brown Sandhills.
Compare that green to the green in the picture below. You’ll notice much of the green is lush and in a perfect circle. That is not the green from trees, rather it is the fields with pivots.
Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nebraska_National_Forest