“In an effort to steward [our nation’s old-growth forests], on Earth Day 2022 the Biden Administration called upon the Department of Agriculture and the Bureau of Land Management to define and map such forests on federal lands. A year later, that work has yielded a first-ever national inventory of mature and old-growth forests – broadly characterized as forests at an advanced stage of development. And with some help from NASA, the public will soon be able view some of these forests like never before.”

Sally Younger of the NASA Earth Science News Team reports on how the GEDI mission is contributing to this work.  Read the NASA article here and check out GEDI visualizations from GSFC here!