The opening of the Landsat data archive and a partnership with Google has allowed researchers to track the fine details of forest change around the world.
To celebrate Earth Day, Earth Observatory released a series of five puzzlers. Except for Thetford forest, all showed landscapes relatively untouched by human society.
In British Columbia’s Coast Mountains, some 200 kilometers (125 miles) inland from the Pacific Ocean, rivers and lakes cut tortuous paths through rugged terrain. The peaks and valleys in this region are covered with forest, but the forest has changed over the years due to human use and insect pests, in particular, the mountain pine beetle.
The deep green forest that covers the northern mountains of Madeira Island is one of the last remnants of an ancient forest that once covered much of Europe and North Africa.
From the Pacific Northwest—home of the towering redwoods&mdash to the Southern Appalachians, this map shows forest canopy heights across the United States.
In June 2008, an international team of researchers released a report on the state of Papua New Guinea’s forests. The study summarized the findings from a five-year project in which the scientists compared high-resolution satellite imagery from the early 1970s and the early 2000s. The researchers found evidence of rapid deforestation and degradation, driven primarily by logging, subsistence agriculture, fires, and the development of mines and plantations.
In recent decades, industrial logging has intensified in the dense tropical forests of central Africa, but few data sets exist that can help ecologists and policymakers monitor the occurrence and impact of logging over wide areas in that part of the world.
Open-access data from the NASA-USGS Landsat mission and cloud computing make for a highly detailed view of gains and losses in global and regional tree cover since 2000.
A new analysis shows how changes in the angle between the Sun and a satellite sensor interact to create the illusion of Amazon forest greening during the dry season.