When signals propagate through forest areas, they will be affected by environmental factors such as vegetation. Different types of environments have different influences on signal attenuation. This paper analyzes the existing classical propagation path loss models and the model with excess loss caused by forest areas and then proposes a new short-range wireless channel propagation model, which can be applied to different types of forest environments. We conducted continuous-wave measurements at a center frequency of 605 MHz on predetermined routes in distinct types of forest areas and recorded the reference signal received power. Then, we use various path loss models to fit the measured data based on different vegetation types and distributions. Simulation results show that the proposed model has substantially smaller fitting errors with reasonable computational complexity, as compared with representative traditional counterparts.