Supplementary disturbance figures for quantifying impacts of natural gas development on forests.

As energy demands continue to rise, energy production from sources including natural gas is expected to rapidly accelerate in the coming decades, potentially leading to substantial land-use changes. In the Appalachian region of the United States, natural gas development often occurs in forested areas, which can cause high levels of forest disturbance and loss. Here, we use nationwide forest inventory and remotely sensed data in a Bayesian model to quantify the impacts of natural gas development at fine spatial resolutions between 2008-2021. Based on well permit locations in the states of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia, the analysis quantifies disturbance area, forest carbon loss, and opportunity cost with associated levels of uncertainty at the pixel-level. Overall, we estimate 10,854 ha of forest land were disturbed, resulting in 542,675 Mg ($\pm$ 4,275) of forest carbon loss. The opportunity cost associated with these disturbances is estimated to be 575,246 Mg ($\pm$ 30,774). P..., , # Supplementary disturbance figures for quantifying impacts of natural gas development on forests.

Dataset DOI: [10.5061/dryad.bg79cnppf](10.5061/dryad.bg79cnppf)

## Description of the data and file structure

A collection of images representing approximately 11,000 natural gas well locations across Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia with estimated forest carbon shown at the pixel-level for disturbed and undisturbed scenarios. 

### Files and variables

#### File: wells_png.zip

**Description:** Compressed folder containing 11,748 png images corresponding to individual natural gas wells in the states of Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Each filename corresponds to a unique well ID number. 

## Access information

Other publicly accessible locations of the data:

* None

Data was derived from the following sources:

* doi: [https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.06.23.661107](https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.06.23.661107)

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