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 layerSatellite era
The forest canopy is the closed layer of leaves and needles. Satellites do not count FAO hectares; they measure how green the surface is. NDVI is that greenness, derived from reflected light.
On a world map the tropical and boreal belts stand out. A single year of clearing is almost invisible at this scale. Tree-cover loss at about 30 metres is on Global Forest Watch.
The maps are NASA MODIS Terra NDVI for July, 2001-2025.
NASA MODIS Terra NDVI, July. Canopy greenness, not Hansen tree-cover-loss pixels. Live 30 m explorer: Global Forest Watch.
July 2025 canopy greenness
Latest July frame on this page. GFW/UMD: tropical primary loss fell to 4.3 million ha in 2025; global tree-cover loss about 25.5 million ha (42 percent fire). A quieter year after a spike, not a “saved” planet.
Green is more vegetation in July. Black is water. Tan is dry or bare. Compare belts: Amazon, Congo, Sundaland, boreal: not a single pixel. Reconstruction plates use their own legends: anthromes are classes of people and land use, not “percent trees.”
NDVI is not forest area and not primary forest. Crops and wet years also look green. July favors the northern summer, so year-to-year change at this resolution is small. The last glacial maximum is about 18,000 years ago, older and colder than 10,000 BCE. The biome plate is a recent-climate analogue; the mid-Holocene Sahara was often greener than it shows.
Source
NASA Worldview / GIBS; MODIS Terra L3 NDVI Monthly
Vintage: July 2025
https://worldview.earthdata.nasa.gov/
License:
Public domain (NASA)
Hansen / University of Maryland GLAD tree-cover loss, about 30 m, 2001-present, on Global Forest Watch. Loss includes fire, forestry, and conversion: not only permanent deforestation.
Open Global Forest Watch →Related maps
Aboveground biomass
Aboveground biomass density from spaceborne lidar, mapped in tonnes per hectare.
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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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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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