Forest Service scientists developed TreeMap to understand the risks wildfire poses to carbon stored in forests. Current wildfire simulation models addressed the fire component of their question, but to tackle the carbon side, they needed information on U.S. forests at the individual tree level. That dataset did not yet exist at a national scale, and with over 2.8 billion pixels of imagery to populate, creating it was a daunting task.
Karin Riley is featured in the Missoulian newspaper article "Tree map: Program catalogs every grove in the U.S. forest"