Maine
Using the ‘Magic’ of LiDAR to Map Maine’s Old-Growth Forests – Inside Climate News
From our collaborating partner Living on Earth, public radio’s environmental news magazine, an interview by Jenni Doering with John Hagan, president of Our Climate Common.
In the remote northern half of Maine, forests dominate the landscape.
While few people live in what’s known as “unorganized territory,” timber companies control vast swaths of land there and frequently harvest trees for housing, furniture, paper and more.
But technology is revealing hidden gems in this part of the state.
The nonprofit Our Climate Common has recently begun using light detection and ranging, or LiDAR, to find patches of biodiverse old-growth forest.
Dr. John Hagan is president of Our Climate Common and holds a Ph.D. in ecology. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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JENNI DOERING: Give us a sense of what the forests in Maine are like for someone who’s never been to the state. What kind of natural landscapes would they encounter there?
JOHN HAGAN: It’s dominated by Northern hardwoods and boreal spruce fir forest, and it’s enormous. It’s like 10 million acres; nobody’s there but forest. It’s a really remarkable part of the landscape that in New England we don’t really appreciate.
DOERING: In this vast wilderness, your organization, Our Climate Common, is using a technology called LiDAR to map these forests. How does this technology work, and what exactly are you trying to illustrate or discover with these maps?
HAGAN: We are using light detection and ranging, or LiDAR, to try to find the old-growth forest in the 10 million acres. It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack. It turns out that LiDAR is kind of like a CAT scan of the forest. If you shoot LiDAR at the forest from an airplane, it gives you a three-dimensional signature of the forest. If you know art history, it’s kind of like pointillism. It’s just a massive three-dimensional point cloud of the forest. And it turns out, that can tell us exactly where the old forest is. About 4 percent of that 10 million acres is old-growth forest. So not very much percentage wise, but that’s about 400,000 acres that you didn’t know you had, and you don’t want to lose.
DOERING: How do you identify old growth using these maps? How do you know that what you’re looking at is a patch of old-growth trees?
HAGAN: We do the fun part, which is go out on the ground across this 10 million acres, and we go into forests—they’re called stands—and we score them based on our ecological knowledge. And then we come back into the lab and say, computer, what did you see? This is what we saw. What did you see? Then we train the computer to find the stuff that we found on the ground.
We can’t cover 10 million acres on foot. I would love to, but we can’t. So the LiDAR does that for us, and it’s incredibly accurate—more than 90 percent accurate. Before using LiDAR to map it, we didn’t know where it was. You had to stumble upon it, the old forest, to find it or to know about it. Now we’ve got a map.
The older stands are blue magenta. Everything that’s younger is yellows or oranges or light greens. You can color it any way you want, but it’s kind of like a neon sign. It’s like, “Light up this old-growth forest on the map.” I’m supposed to be a scientist, but to me, LiDAR and what it shows you about the forest just seems like magic.
DOERING: Why is it important to know where these late stage old-growth forests, or I think they’re called LSOG, are? Why are they so crucial to protect?
HAGAN: It’s not surprising that a lot of plant and animal species evolved in an older forest landscape. They evolved to depend on big, dead wood. So when you don’t have big trees and big, dead wood, you start to lose some of the species that evolve to depend on that. And so if we don’t keep some old forest, we will lose that element of biodiversity. And old forests like LSOG have enormous stocks of carbon; the stores are around five to 10 times what an average forest would hold in current stocks. So if you lose it, you lose a lot of carbon per acre.
A 40-year old stand is growing fast, so often it will be sequestering carbon much faster than an old stand, but it’s got a long, long way to go to get to the stocks of an old forest.
DOERING: The New England Forestry Foundation recently received $4.3 million from the U.S. Forest Service, and your maps of Maine’s old-growth forests are playing a big role in how they plan to use that grant. How are they making use of the data that you’ve collected?
HAGAN: Most of the remaining LSOG forest is on commercial timberland, private commercial timberlands, people who are in the business of making wood and paper and stuff like that. The challenge is, how do you compensate landowners to keep them because they’re just losing out financially to let them grow.
To us, the value of the carbon in these old stands is worth as much and maybe a little more than the timber value. Then it just becomes an economic transaction. Look, I own this land. I would normally cut timber, but if the carbon is worth more, I’ll sell you the carbon and keep the stand. So if the New England Forestry Foundation has all this money to pay landowners, we could say, go here first.
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DOERING: It gives you a place to start. These are the highest priority stands, so let’s protect that.
HAGAN: That’s right. And it could be on public land and already protected. We don’t need to worry about that, but if it’s on commercial timberland, most likely it’s destined to be harvested in the next five to 10 years. So that’s why matching the financial opportunity with landowners could prevent loss of these older stands like, right now.
DOERING: Demand for wood for furniture, houses and other goods isn’t stopping anytime soon. So what about these younger forests that would still inevitably be cut down by these large timber companies? Wouldn’t they also eventually become old-growth, if left alone?
HAGAN: If left alone, they would, but they’re not going to be left alone, because that’s not the goal of the landowners. But you make an important point that is a fault or a flaw of some forest offset projects like, well, you protected that stand and that stand and that stand, but they’re just going to cut another stand because we need a fixed amount of wood. It’s called “leakage” in the carbon offset marketplace, and it’s a problem. Things just move around like pieces on a chessboard, because wood is a globalized product. The atmosphere is a global entity.
In our case, and what New England Forestry Foundation plans to do is have landowners and take the proceeds from paying for the old stands and invest in silviculture, forestry practices, on the other acres that would accelerate the growth of those stands so that we don’t leak, and we don’t just push the carbon off to some other place and it ends up in the atmosphere anyway. That’s why, in the end, we need to be growing more carbon per acre, and that’s the way forests can help with getting carbon out of the atmosphere. But it’s complex, and if you don’t cross all the Ts, you end up not making a difference.
DOERING: Why is it important to work across different groups, bringing different stakeholders like the timber industry and conservationists together, as opposed to just trying to dig your heels in and say, we’re not going to work with you?
HAGAN: My whole career, I’ve been working collaboratively with people like fishermen and foresters, and I find that they know stuff I do not know. And if I don’t know what they know, I can’t solve the problem that I’m trying to solve. You know, I got this idea, and they say, well, that’s just not going to work, John, the machine can’t get there. And so I didn’t know that.
In the traditional way to do battle, you never really take the opportunity to respect the other person or understand what they know and value what they know. When you do, it just changes the whole problem-solving landscape, and it works.
In Maine, especially with this grant, we’ve got an opportunity to all sit down together and say, “What should this look like in the year 2100?” and say, OK, we can make it look like that. If we’re smart about it and we collaborate, we can do it differently this time, and this grant will help move us that way.
DOERING: Do you have a favorite spot in the forest, in one of these old-growth stands in Maine, and what’s it like there?
HAGAN: In one of our stands that lit up in LiDAR, we went in and did measurements, we cored one tree. It doesn’t hurt the tree; it pulls out a core of the tree, and then you count the rings to see how old the tree is. This tree was 253 years old, and it was typical of these old stands we’re finding. And then I started thinking about Henry David Thoreau, who walked through Maine in 1850-something, he could have walked by this tree, literally.
This is kind of silly, but he could have walked by this tree because it would have been 70 years old when he went through Maine. It was a seedling when the first shot was fired at Lexington for the Revolutionary War. When you know you’re standing beside a tree that old, that’s been around that long, it is intangible. It’s special. It’s just like, wow. It puts you in perspective.
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A Massachusetts photographer was seriously injured when he was stabbed during a wedding reception last month in Raymond, Maine.
Donald Halsing, 26, was hospitalized for five days after the stabbing on May 23. NBC affiliate News Center Maine reported that 26-year-old Andrew Manderson was arrested and charged with elevated aggravated assault.
Still recovering, Halsing told NBC10 Boston the attack came out of nowhere — one moment, he was snapping photos on the dance floor, while the next, he was searching for help as blood spilled onto his camera.
“I was sitting there in that chair thinking, ‘There’s a real possibility I could die here,’” Halsing said. “Immediately, I put my hand on my chest here to try and stop the bleeding, get some pressure on it, and started yelling for help.”
Halsing was working at the reception at the Kingsley Pine Campgrounds. He took his last photo at 9:01 p.m., minutes before the stabbing.
“One of the wedding guests came up to me and started asking questions about our business,” he said.
Halsing said it was nothing out of the ordinary, and he tried to explain his photography business to the inquiring guest through the pulse of the DJ booth and celebrating guests.
“I thought he was going to reach in his back pocket for his phone, and instead, he didn’t pull out his phone — he pulled out a pocket knife and stabbed me,” he said.
Manderson, who faced a judge days later, is a cousin of the bride.
“There was this look in his eyes that he wasn’t quite all there,” Halsing said.
Halsing’s fiancée, Ashley Wall, was feet away as he struggled to stay awake. She has been his photography partner for eight years since they met at Framingham State University, and she was helping him work the wedding.
“People who were around me, they asked, ‘What can we do to help you? What do you need?’ And I said, ‘Please go check on Ashley. Please go check on my fiancée,’” he recalled.
Halsing spent five days in the hospital suffering from two lacerations to his liver, ultimately developing a blood clot in his left leg. But the road to recovery exceeds his physical wounds as he contemplates his mental state when he resumes photography next year.
“I’m also worried about what lingering effects there might be,” he said. “If we get out on the dance floor and I start remembering what happened, I don’t know how I’m going to react.”
Halsing still doesn’t know why he was attacked.
Manderson was released on $50,000 bail and is due back in court in October.
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This story will be updated.
The Maine Department of Transportation is moving to slash up to $400 million in projects from its agenda, a shocking and abrupt cutback that is rattling the state’s construction industry at the start of building season.
Roughly $50 million across six pavement projects have already been delayed, according to a memo exclusively obtained by the Bangor Daily News. The agency plans to cut or delay another $150 million in bridge, highway, intersection and multimodal projects later this month. A further $200 million or more in cuts are planned in the next three-year work plan.
Those figures were outlined by Transportation Commissioner Dale Doughty in the May 18 memo to Gov. Janet Mills that has since circulated widely in the transportation sector, which has been getting drip-by-drip details on the wide scope of the cuts over the past three weeks.
It comes at the beginning of the state’s relatively narrow construction season. Companies have hired workers and ordered materials for projects they expected to begin this summer. The severity of the transportation budget problems was not raised to lawmakers during the 2026 legislative session.
Kelly Flagg, executive director of the Associated General Contractors of Maine, called the shortfall “deeply troubling” in a statement.
“We stand ready to work with policymakers, stakeholders, and industry partners to identify both immediate and long-term solutions,” Flagg said. “Maine cannot afford to fall further behind.”
Insiders saw this first.
This story was broken in Maine Politics Insider, the BDN’s daily premium newsletter for the most ardent political news followers. If you are a new BDN subscriber, you can sign up here. Current subscribers can contact our customer service team to upgrade.
The cuts stem from a structural funding gap of at least $130 million in the state’s current work plan, according to Doughty’s memo. Losses are magnified because state money from the gas tax and other revenue sources is matched by federal funds. Lawmakers have long grappled with politically difficult long-term problems with the state’s transportation budget.
A Mills spokesperson said Wednesday morning that the administration was working on a response to questions from the BDN. The department says it needs roughly $240 million more in state capital funding annually to maintain the existing system, and that anything less than $200 million will erode it over time.
Doughty’s memo the only near-term solution is a series of bonds beginning as soon as possible. Lawmakers would have to return to Augusta to authorize that if one is going to appear on the November ballot.
The BDN Opinion section operates independently and does not set news policies or contribute to reporting or editing articles elsewhere in the newspaper or on bangordailynews.com
Michael Capeci is the former chairman of the Bangor GOP.
Let’s be honest about Maine’s current state.
For many families, the cost of living has become unsustainable. Housing is out of reach for many young people. Energy bills keep rising. Many small businesses are struggling under taxes and regulations that make it harder to grow. Rural hospitals are under strain and despite years of increased state spending, the results are not showing up in people’s daily lives.
Concurrently, Maine continues to lose young workers to other states. That is not a statistic, it is a warning sign.
To me, the question in this Republican primary for governor is not about slogans. It is whether we continue with a political approach that has failed to reverse these trends, or whether we nominate someone with new ideas. I think that someone is Owen McCarthy.
Owen is not a political insider. He is an entrepreneur from Patten, a small town where opportunity is not assumed, it is built. He grew up in a working-class family, became the first in his family to graduate from college graduating from the University of Maine, and founded MedRhythms, a healthcare technology company focused on neurological treatment.
He didn’t just talk about opportunity. He built it. That distinction matters, because Maine’s problem is not a lack of debate it is a lack of results. We have seen the trajectory: higher costs, slower growth, and a steady outmigration of young workers. I believe Owen McCarthy represents a break from that pattern.
His Maine 2040 plan focuses on creating 50,000 new jobs in sectors where Maine has real advantages — maritime and defense, advanced forest products, and life sciences. These are export-driven industries tied directly to Maine’s workforce, geography, and institutions. What sets Owen apart is not only what he proposes, but how he approaches governing.
He prioritizes modernizing permitting so projects do not stall. He supports using technology to reduce costs and increase efficiency. He focuses on making it easier to build, hire, and expand in Maine.
That same practical mindset extends to healthcare. Expanding telehealth, strengthening EMS systems, improving provider flexibility, and shifting toward earlier intervention are not abstract reforms. They are system upgrades designed to improve access while controlling costs.
Maine voters consistently respond to competence. They reward candidates who understand problems and present plans to solve them. I believe they are tired of rhetoric that does not translate into results, and skeptical of politics that prioritizes messaging over execution.
Owen’s approach is grounded in solving the issues that shape daily life — affordability, healthcare access, job creation, and government efficiency. That is not just policy positioning. It is a governing model that speaks directly to voters.
Some will point to his lack of political experience. But I believe Maine’s core problems are not the result of insufficient political experience; they are the result of policies that have failed to deliver measurable improvement. Experience inside a broken system, by itself, is not a solution.
If Republicans want to win, this primary must be taken seriously. From my perspective, it is not about choosing a nominee for governor who can energize the base. It is about selecting someone who can compete in a broader electorate that is frustrated and looking for change.
That requires a candidate who can speak beyond the base, not by abandoning principles, but by demonstrating competence and a credible plan to address Maine’s challenges. I believe Owen McCarthy offers that combination. He represents a shift away from managed decline and toward economic execution.
This is not just another primary. It is a decision about whether Republicans position themselves to win Maine or whether they remain trapped in a cycle of repeating the same strategies and expecting different outcomes.
If Republicans want to compete for Maine’s future, they cannot afford to nominate a candidate who only motivates part of the electorate. They need someone who expands it.
I believe Owen McCarthy is that candidate.
And if the goal is to win Maine, then the choice should be unmistakable
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