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 layerEcological zones
Climatic and ecological zones used for forest reporting: a zoning of land by climate and ecology.
FAO Global Ecological Zones · GEZ 2010 · FRA reporting
What it is
The Global Ecological Zones, second edition, the 2010 update used in Forest Resources Assessment reporting, classify the world’s land into ecological zones for consistent forest statistics. Data and documentation are in the Food and Agriculture Organization catalog, the zones PDF, the Open Knowledge record, and on the assessment site. The layer is that climatic and ecological zoning.
Why it matters
The zones place forest statistics in a climate and ecology frame.
How to read it
The classes include tropical rainforest, boreal coniferous, temperate oceanic, and others. They place the assessment tables and national forest statistics in climatic context. The catalog dataset and the zones PDF describe the classes.
Sources
Related maps
Aboveground biomass
Aboveground biomass density from spaceborne lidar, mapped in tonnes per hectare.
Open the layer
Burned area
Where fire burned in 2023, as the annual burned fraction on a quarter-degree grid.
Open the layer
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.
Open the layer
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.
Open the layer
Tree cover
Where the 2021 land-cover map assigns the tree-cover class, counted as the share of each cell.
Open the layer
Peatlands
Where the peat map records peat: a global extent of organic soils.
Open the layer
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.
Open the layer
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.
Open the layer
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.
Open the layer
Satellite era
July canopy greenness from space, 2001-2025.
Open the layer
Reconstructions
Ice-age vegetation, biomes, and land after people.
Open the layer
Trend and futures
The long view, the years we can measure, and three possible paths.
Open the layer