Forests and trees play a critical role in carbon sequestration while providing other benefits to communities, including improving air quality, regulating hydrological processes, reducing energy costs and promoting well-being. Accurate monitoring of these resources over time may enable communities to make better land management decisions that benefit both climate and people simultaneously.

Many communities in the U.S. are developing Climate Action Plans (CAPs) to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and achieve carbon neutrality. While many CAPs focus on the energy, transportation and waste sectors, most do not consider the role forests and trees play in the fight against climate change. One reason is that planners have lacked the data and clear guidance needed to include them in GHG inventories, on which CAPs are based.

To address this gap, experts from WRI, the Woodwell Climate Research Center, and ICLEI - Local Governments for Sustainability (ICLEI USA) published guidance for ICLEI USA’s U.S. Community Protocol as well as the Global Protocol for Community-Scale Greenhouse Gas Emission Inventories. These frameworks outline how to estimate emissions from forest and tree cover loss within communities, as well as carbon absorbed by forests and trees that are maintained or newly planted by a community.

Introducing the Land Emissions and Removals Navigator (LEARN)

Accompanying this guidance is the Land Emissions and Removals Navigator (LEARN) tool, developed in collaboration with web developer Blue Raster. LEARN is a free online tool with open-source code that integrates national geospatial data sets with methods from the U.S. Community protocol, enabling communities to estimate GHG impacts from changes to forests and tree cover over time.

In just a few clicks, users can derive locally tailored estimates of the annual GHG impacts associated with changes to forests and tree cover in their community over time. After specifying an area and years to analyze, LEARN does the rest by performing automated, spatially explicit analyses of data from the U.S. Forest Service and U.S. Geological Survey, including:

  • Land cover change
  • Timing and location of forest disturbances like fire, harvest and insect outbreaks
  • Loss and gain of tree canopy cover in urban and other non-forested lands
  • Carbon stocks within forests of different maturity classes and protection statuses

(Read more about the history and development of the LEARN tool, and read about the data and methodology here.)

Updates in 2022 Expanded LEARN’s Data Coverage

In 2022, the LEARN project team collaborated with the Chesapeake Conservancy to implement a suite of updates. This included land cover change and forest disturbance data updated through the year 2019, as well as high resolution (1-meter) tree canopy change maps for the Chesapeake Bay watershed. These maps span across six eastern states and the District of Columbia and support communities of more than 18 million people.

LEARN had previously performed analysis only on the 30-meter resolution NLCD Tree Canopy product. The introduction of new high-resolution tree canopy data at 1-meter resolution provides 900-times more detail than before for counties and cities along the eastern seaboard, who can now analyze tree canopy change down to the scale of individual land parcels. This update demonstrated the benefits of significantly enhanced analysis capabilities and reinforced calls to extend this data set from regional to national coverage.

Training Cohorts Bring Support Directly to Communities

Following a first successful Forests & Trees Carbon Accounting Cohort Training Session in 2021, in July 2022, the LEARN project team launched a second training cohort to guide 20 communities in implementing the U.S. Community Protocol methods and using the LEARN tool. Participants represented municipal governments, tribes and states from across the country. In 2023, a third cohort was convened to support communities in integrating local, high-resolution data sets into analyses. This cohort also piloted the use of “plantable areas” analyses to help communities estimate potential impacts of tree planting initiatives.

New Updates in 2025 Further Expand LEARN’s Capabilities

In 2025, LEARN has integrated the most up-to-date NLCD data for land cover and tree canopy, spanning 20 years of land cover change (2001-2021) and more than a decade of tree canopy change (2011-2019).

Additionally, higher resolution (30-meter) maps of forest carbon pools and forest characteristics data like forest type and age class from the USFS BIGMAP project replaced the older 250-meter data sets, allowing for more precise calculations of carbon fluxes. Automated analyses now include additional insights on forest maturity, protection status and carbon stocks within maturity and protection groups.

Finally, another new feature allows users to input custom emission and removal factors, enabling users to tailor the tool’s default calculations to specific local conditions.

Next Steps for LEARN and GHG Monitoring for Forests and Trees

The LEARN tool has established itself as a trustworthy and easy-to-use tool to support communities in estimating GHG fluxes from the land sector. LEARN has been added by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to its Technical Assistance Forum Resource Library to help support Climate Pollution Reduction Grant (CPRG) recipients across the country, and the team plans to introduce the LEARN tool to CPRG grantees in 2025. Building upon growing user engagement, in 2025 LEARN will continue to expand its reach to stakeholders and broader geographic scales. This includes partnering with Crosswalk Labs to integrate land sector GHG flux insights into the Crosswalk platform, further expanding its impacts on climate efforts nationwide.

WRI and partners are continuing to seek input from stakeholders across the U.S. and around the world on how these methods may best be scaled across geographies, governments and technical capacities. In the future, this kind of data will be available for communities around the world, not just in the U.S. — read more here about upcoming developments in monitoring GHGs for forests and land worldwide.

For questions or to learn more, reach out to erin.glen@wri.org.