Mapping Forests Through Time

Annual maps of the lower-48 United States produced from Landsat data illustrate how forests changed from 1986-2010. Logging and hurricanes play a significant role in the Southeast, and fires and insect invasion damage forest canopy in the West.Complete transcript available.Music credit: Dusk On The Plains by B. BostonWatch this video on the NASA Goddard YouTube channel. A web video with no narration that showcases the North American Forest Dynamics (NAFD) study including the visualizations that show forest loss from a mountain pine beetle outbreak, a hurricane, mining, and wildfires.Music credit: Drifting Clouds by Andrew Britton. Short clip from longer video on US forest dynamics. This section shows forest disturbance across the contiguous United States from 1986-2010. Dark green pixels had no disturbance during those years. Yellow shows where a disturbance happened in a particular year. Short clip from longer video on US forest dynamics. Protected areas around Broken Bow Lake in southeast Oklahoma remain largely undisturbed compared to the surrounding region, which flickers with the tell-tale patches of timber harvesting. Short clip from longer video on US forest dynamics. This section shows the spread of the Hobet Mine in Boone County, West Virginia. Short clip from longer video on US forest dynamics. Hurricane Hugo knocked down trees across four and a half million acres when it made landfall in South Carolina in September of 1989. The disturbance of the forest is visible in the 1990 data. Short clip from longer video on US forest dynamics. On Mother's Day, 2008, several tornadoes in Georgia left a track 150 kilometers long and about 2 kilometers wide. Short clip from longer video on US forest dynamics. This shows spread of damage from Mountain Pine Beetles in northern Colorado (near Rocky Mountain National Park) from 2003-2007. Forests are living, ever changing ecosystems, affected by aging, natural disasters and human interventions. Annual maps of the lower-48 United States produced from satellite data illustrate how these dynamic systems changed from 1986-2010. Logging and hurricanes play a significant role in the Southeast, and fires and insect invasion damage forest canopy in the West. Trees are one of the world's best absorbers of atmospheric carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas. Understanding how trees and forests change through time is one of the first steps to understanding how active they are in pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, which is of profound interest to scientists monitoring climate change. Developed for the North American Forest Dynamics study, scientists combined 25 years of satellite data from the joint U.S. Geological Survey/NASA Landsat satellite program with information from the U.S. Forest Service to highlight where forest canopy was disturbed. To learn more about the project and get data, visit: https://daac.ornl.gov/NACP/guides/NAFD-NEX_Forest_Disturbance.html Related pages

Visualization showing forest change in various locations from 1986 to 2010This video is also available on our YouTube channel. Colors for persistent water (dark blue), nonforest (gray), and forest (dark green) Colors for the integrated forest disturbance (beginning of the visualization) from 1986 (yellowish-green) through 2010 (white) Colors for disturbed forest (orange) through recovery (green) The North American Forest Dynamics (NAFD) study provides annual maps of forest disturbance in the conterminous United States, from 1986-2010. Using data from the NASA/USGS Landsat satellite program, the NAFD study produces maps at a spatial resolution of 30-meters. Spanning the 25 years of the study required 26,142 Landsat images and the use of the NASA Earth Exchange (NEX) supercomputing facility. Each annual map has classified pixels showing water, no forest cover, forest cover, no data available (data gaps) in present year, and forest disturbances that occurred in that year. Forest disturbance, in this study, refers to any removal or loss of the forest canopy. There were disturbances from natural causes, such as fires, insect outbreaks, hurricanes, tornadoes, and snow storms. There were also human-caused disturbances such as timber harvesting, urban development, and mining. Major timber harvest areas included the Southeast, the Pacific Northwest, and Maine. Extensive mountaintop mining was found in the Southern Appalachians, extending from Western Virginia to Tennessee. The eastern coast suffered substantial damages from hurricanes, while large scale damages from fire and insect outbreak were mostly in the western U.S.This study is a core project of the North American Carbon Program (NACP), a multidisciplinary research program designed to obtain scientific understanding of North America’s carbon sources and sinks and quantify changes in carbon stocks. This information is being used to evaluate the role of forest disturbance in the North American carbon cycle, which will help meet societal concerns and provide tools for decision makers.The NAFD (North American Forest Dynamics) study, a core project of the North American Carbon Program (NACP), was supported by grants from NASA’s Terrestrial Ecology, Carbon Cycle Sciences, and Applied Sciences Programs. The UMD group was supported under NASA Grant NNX11AJ78G S01. Associated NAFD-NEX activities have been carried out by Warren Cohen, USFS Pacific Northwest Research Station (Product Validation), Jeffrey Masek, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (Regrowth Dynamics), Gretchen Moisen, USFS Rocky Mountain Research Station (Causal Factors Attribution) and Ramakrishna Nemani, NASA Ames Research Center (NEX computing).Data Citation:Goward, S.N., C. Huang, F. Zhao, K. Schleeweis, K. Rishmawi, M. Lindsey, J.L. Dungan, and A. Michaelis. 2015. NACP NAFD Project: Forest Disturbance History from Landsat, 1986-2010. ORNL DAAC, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, USA. http://dx.doi.org/10.3334/ORNLDAAC/1290 Related pages