Individual Tree Carbon Stocks Across African Drylands

Africa's semi-arid zone north of the equator contains an estimated 9.9 billion tree crowns with modeled carbon stocks. NASA produced this dataset by analyzing 326,523 high-resolution Maxar satellite images from 2002 to 2021, applying allometric equations derived from field harvests. The data is provided in geospatial formats with an interactive viewer for tree-level exploration.

Use Cases

• Modeling continental-scale carbon storage in dryland trees using the estimated carbon stock per crown.
• Analyzing spatial distribution of tree biomass across the 0-1000 mm/year precipitation zone via GeoPackage and GeoTIFF files.
• Validating allometric equations for semi-arid species with the provided field measurement CSV data.
• Tracking changes in tree cover over time using the 2002-2021 satellite image metadata in Shapefile format.

Strengths

• Covers an exceptionally large sample of nearly 10 billion individual tree crowns.
• Derived from a massive collection of 326,523 high-resolution (50-cm) satellite images.
• Includes ground-truth field measurements from destructive harvests to support the allometry.
• Provides a quantified uncertainty estimate of +/- 19.8% for the carbon stock models.

Limitations

• Conflicting last updated dates: Data.gov lists 2026-03-13, while NASA Earthdata lists 2021-03-31.
• Specific column names for the GeoPackage, CSV, and Shapefile data are not provided by any source.
• Coverage is limited to the dry season (November-March) and the specified precipitation zone.

Provenance

Source

National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)

Collection Method

Allometric estimation from 50-cm resolution Maxar satellite imagery, supported by field destructive harvest measurements.

Time Range

2002 to 2021

Freshness

2026-03-13 06:03:00.187572

Geography

Africa north of the equator and south of the Sahara Desert, within the 0 to 1000 mm/year precipitation zone.