Canopy height
How tall the forest canopy is, measured by spaceborne lidar as a mean top height on a grid of about 1 kilometre.
Open the layerAboveground biomass
Aboveground biomass density from spaceborne lidar, mapped in tonnes per hectare.
NASA GEDI L4B · gridded AGBD v2.1 · Mg/ha
What it is
NASA GEDI L4B Gridded Aboveground Biomass Density v2.1 (ORNL DAAC DOI 10.3334/ORNLDAAC/2299) estimates aboveground biomass density (AGBD) on a regular grid from GEDI lidar samples. Data and documentation are published on NASA Earthdata, the ORNL DAAC dataset viewer for dataset 2299, and the ORNL GEDI L4B user guide. The layer is a biomass-density map.
Why it matters
Forest statistics may report a carbon stock total of about 714 gigatonnes of carbon. This plate is a mapped density in tonnes per hectare from the same lidar.
How to read it
The field is living aboveground biomass density, typically megagrams per hectare. Coverage follows the lidar sampling geography, and the product documentation includes uncertainty layers. The Earthdata catalog, the Oak Ridge dataset viewer for 2299, and the user guide describe the field.
Sources
Related maps
Burned area
Where fire burned in 2023, as the annual burned fraction on a quarter-degree grid.
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Ecological zones
Climatic and ecological zones used for forest reporting: a zoning of land by climate and ecology.
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Planted forests
Where the 2015 forest-management map marks planted forest and short-rotation timber plantation, with the reported total of about 312 million hectares.
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Forest carbon stock
Country totals of living-biomass carbon in 2025, aboveground plus belowground, from the forest assessment, with the five-pool global total alongside.
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Tree cover
Where the 2021 land-cover map assigns the tree-cover class, counted as the share of each cell.
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Peatlands
Where the peat map records peat: a global extent of organic soils.
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Forest remaining
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations reports that forests cover 4.14 billion hectares, 32 percent of the world land, based on reports from 236 countries and areas.
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Primary forest
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations reports at least 1.18 billion hectares of primary forest, 29 percent of all forest: naturally regenerating forest of native tree species with no clearly visible signs of human activity.
Open the layerSource: Global Forest Resources Assessment 2025, primary forests
Net forest-area loss
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations reports that the world forest area shrank by a net 4.12 million hectares a year in 2015 to 2025, down from 10.7 million hectares a year in 1990 to 2000.
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Tropical primary forest loss
The World Resources Institute reports that the world lost 4.3 million hectares of tropical primary rainforest in 2025, 36 percent less than in the record year 2024.
Open the layerSource: World Resources Institute, Global Forest Review analysis of tropical forest loss in 2025
Trees living
A 2015 study in the journal Nature combined 429,775 forest plot measurements with remote sensing and mapping layers and estimated that there are about 3.04 trillion trees on Earth.
Open the layerSource: Nature, Mapping tree density at a global scale (2015)
Numbers
Definitions, sources, and the rest of the published set.
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Satellite era
July canopy greenness from space, 2001-2025.
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Reconstructions
Ice-age vegetation, biomes, and land after people.
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Trend and futures
The long view, the years we can measure, and three possible paths.
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