Aboveground biomass
Aboveground biomass density from spaceborne lidar, mapped in tonnes per hectare.
Open the layerCanopy height
How tall the forest canopy is, measured by spaceborne lidar as a mean top height on a grid of about 1 kilometre.
NASA GEDI L3 · RH100 mean canopy height · ~1 km
What it is
NASA GEDI L3 Gridded Land Surface Metrics v2 (Oak Ridge dataset 10.3334/ORNLDAAC/1952) publishes gridded land-surface metrics from the Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation lidar on the International Space Station, including mean canopy height at about 1 km resolution within roughly 52 degrees north and south. Data and documentation are on NASA Earthdata, the Oak Ridge dataset viewer for dataset 1952, and the mission pages at the University of Maryland. Further reading includes Potapov and colleagues, Nature Ecology and Evolution (2021). The layer shows how tall the stands are.
Why it matters
Canopy height is a structure measurement: how tall the canopy is.
How to read it
The height metric is a relative height near the top of the lidar waveform, a proxy for canopy top height. Coverage stops near 52 degrees north and south, so polar and some high-latitude forests are outside this grid. Product documentation is on the Earthdata catalog and the Oak Ridge dataset viewer. The mission pages describe the instrument.
Sources
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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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Open the layerSource: Global Forest Resources Assessment 2025, primary forests
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Open the layerSource: World Resources Institute, Global Forest Review analysis of tropical forest loss in 2025
Trees living
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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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