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My point is: it is correct grammatically but wrong semantically. "Земли покрываются лесами" and "Леса покрывают земли" mean different things. First is a process, second is a condition (mostly).

Though you can easily see that in all cases of usage "покрывать" with I it has very different meaning, namely it means an action "S is putting I onto O" while without I it means a static state "S is...

Well, it is just wrong. It should be without "собой". Though a native speaker can make an error like that.