American Forests and the Nature Conservancy partnered to release an online mapping tool, using data from a Nature Conservancy paper published in the journal One Earth.
The Reforestation Hub
The “Reforestation Hub” allows users to reforestation identify opportunities across the continental US. This analysis identified 133 million acres of opportunity to restore forest cover for climate mitigation. County-level data is viewable in the online tool, and higher resolution (30m GIS rasters) is available for download.
The map shows estimates of the potential area of new forests and how much carbon could be sequestered through the creation of these new forests. Users can filter reforestation opportunity areas by a variety of criteria – such as identifying post-burn reforestation needs, biological corridors, or floodplains. This analysis is focused on identifying cost-effective and feasible reforestation locations. This tool is specifically oriented towards identifying opportunities to restore historically forested areas – with an emphasis on locations that historically had significant cover but are now unforested.
