<p>Coastal forests worldwide are vulnerable to hurricanes, which cause significant canopy loss and long-term disruption of ecosystem services. Scalable methods for assessing hurricane-driven forest damage are critical for ecosystem recovery, yet conventional field-based approaches are time-consuming, costly and challenging to acquire over large areas. The Ice Cloud and land Elevation Satellite-2 land and vegetation height product (ATL08) provides three-dimensional information, and its capability of measuring forest structure is already well demonstrated. However, its integration with satellite imagery for mapping hurricane-induced canopy height changes remains limited. In this study, we analyzed coastal forest canopy losses and thematic transitions using ICESat-2, Sentinel-2, and ancillary predictors. We used Random Forest (RF) and Extreme Gradient Boosted (XGB) regression models to extrapolate ATL08 pre-hurricane canopy heights and applied the better-performing model for post-hurricane mapping. The resulting canopy height maps were combined with existing land cover products to assess structural and thematic transitions across the impacted landscape. RF outperformed XGB (R² = 0.44, RMSE = 4.30 m vs. R² = 0.41, RMSE = 4.76 m). Landcover shifts included transitions from evergreen to herbaceous, scrub, and barren classes, and from woody wetlands to emergent herbaceous wetlands, with mean canopy height losses of 2.3–5.2 m. Canopy cover analysis showed dense (&gt; 60%) and sparse (&lt; 30%) cover experienced greatest losses (up to 8.3 m), while moderate covers (30–60%) were resilient. This study demonstrates the potential of integrating ICESat-2 and Sentinel-2 for assessing structural and thematic changes and informing adaptive strategies in hurricane-prone coastal ecosystems.</p>