Acoustic pulse propagation through forests is important for many applications, including noise attenuation by stands of trees, and localization of sound sources. Due to the highly complicated distribution of trees in natural forests, it is appropriate to consider a forest as a continuous distribution of scatterers of various shapes and sizes. A propagation model based on radiative transfer theory under a modified Born approximation may be developed for this situation to describe both the coherent and diffuse sound propagation . The simple case of an impulse in an infinite homogeneous forest of diffuse scatterers is first considered, and then the effects of successively including non-diffuse scatterers, ground reflections in a forest of finite height, and, finally, a realistic forest model are analyzed. These theoretical findings are then compared with experimental results. Lastly, a numerical example describing the effect of a forest on a simple beamforming array is considered.Acoustic pulse propagation through forests is important for many applications, including noise attenuation by stands of trees, and localization of sound sources. Due to the highly complicated distribution of trees in natural forests, it is appropriate to consider a forest as a continuous distribution of scatterers of various shapes and sizes. A propagation model based on radiative transfer theory under a modified Born approximation may be developed for this situation to describe both the coherent and diffuse sound propagation . The simple case of an impulse in an infinite homogeneous forest of diffuse scatterers is first considered, and then the effects of successively including non-diffuse scatterers, ground reflections in a forest of finite height, and, finally, a realistic forest model are analyzed. These theoretical findings are then compared with experimental results. Lastly, a numerical example describing the effect of a forest on a simple beamforming array is considered.