Aboveground dry woody biomass density estimates for high northern latitude forests at a 30-meter spatial resolution for the year 2020. The data were derived from NASA's ICESat-2 lidar and Harmonized Landsat/Sentinel-2 imagery and are provided by ORNL_CLOUD. This dataset accounts for more than 30% of global forest area and is designed for circumpolar boreal-wide mapping.
Use Cases
- Modeling carbon storage and flux in boreal ecosystems based on aboveground biomass density estimates.
- Monitoring changes in forest structure and health over time based on 2020 satellite-derived snapshots.
- Integrating northern forest biomass data with complementary GEDI mission data for global forest structure analysis.
- Conducting local to global scale ecological and climate impact studies based on the 30-meter resolution geospatial data.
Strengths
- Provides estimates for over 30% of global forest area.
- Uses state-of-the-art earth observation data from NASA's ICESat-2 and Harmonized Landsat/Sentinel-2.
- Offers high spatial resolution of 30 meters for detailed analysis.
- Data is provided in multiple modern geospatial formats including cloud optimized GeoTIFF and GeoPackage.
Limitations
- Description metadata is limited; actual data quality requires manual inspection after download.
- Last updated 2020-12-31 23:59:59.999000; freshness should be verified.
- Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
Provenance
- Source
- ORNL_CLOUD via nasa_earthdata
- Collection Method
- Derived from NASA's ICESat-2 lidar and Harmonized Landsat/Sentinel-2 imagery.
- Time Range
- 2020
- Freshness
- 2020-12-31 23:59:59.999000
- Geography
- Circumpolar boreal forests and shrublands, nominally extending southward to ~50 degrees N, intended for global estimates northward from 51.6 degrees N.