We provide consensus on the benefits of nature experience for mental health, and a model for integrating them into urban design.

Significance: The state of California has a globally important economy and a population exceeding 38 million. The state relies on its forested watersheds to support numerous services, such as water provisioning, carbon storage, timber products, ecotourism, and recreation. However, secular changes in air temperature, combined with periodic and prolonged drought, pose a compounding challenge to forest health. Here we use new remote-sensing and modeling techniques to assess changes in the canopy water content of California’s forests from 2011 to 2015. Our resulting maps of progressive canopy water stress identify at-risk forest landscapes and watersheds at fine resolution, and offer geographically explicit information to support innovative forest management and policies in preparation for climate change.

Airborne spectroscopy for forest traits: The development of conservation priorities in the tropics is often hampered by the sparseness of ground data on biological diversity and the relative crudeness of larger-scale remote sensing data. Asneret al.developed airborne instrumentation to make large-scale maps of forest functional diversity across 72 million hectares of the Peruvian Andes and Amazon basin (see the Perspective by Kapos). They generated a suite of forest canopy functional trait maps from laser-guided imaging spectroscopy and used them to define distinct forest functional classes. These were then compared with government deforestation and land allocation data, which enabled an analysis of conservation threats and opportunities across the region.Science, this issue p.385; see also p.347