Global GEDI Lidar Grids of Forest Canopy Structure

Vegetation structure metrics derived from NASA's GEDI spaceborne lidar, aggregated into near-global raster grids. The dataset includes canopy height, cover, plant area index, and foliage height diversity, aggregated from 7.7 billion quality waveforms collected between April 2019 and March 2023. It provides analysis-ready data at 1 km, 6 km, and 12 km resolutions for the full mission and annual periods.

Use Cases

• Modeling carbon stocks using gridded canopy height and plant area volume density metrics.
• Assessing forest habitat complexity with foliage height diversity and canopy cover statistics.
• Calibrating regional biomass maps using the bootstrapped standard error of the mean for canopy height.
• Analyzing vertical vegetation structure changes over time with annual plant area index grids.
• Mapping global forest structure for biodiversity studies using the Shannon's diversity index of canopy metrics.

Strengths

• Derived from a large sample of 7.7 billion quality lidar waveforms, providing high statistical confidence.
• Includes eight summary statistics (e.g., mean, median, standard error) for each metric, enabling robust error analysis.
• Validated with independent data and uses a quality filtering methodology aligned with the authoritative GEDI L4B biomass product.
• Provides multi-resolution (1km, 6km, 12km) and multi-temporal (annual, full mission) grids for flexible analysis.

Limitations

• Spatial coverage is limited to between approximately 52 degrees North and South latitude.
• Specific column names and dataset size/row counts are not provided in the available metadata.
• There is a conflict in the 'last updated' date between sources (2023-03-16 vs. 2026-03-13).

Provenance

Source

NASA Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) Level 2 and 4A products, processed by ORNL_CLOUD.

Collection Method

Metrics derived from 25-m diameter lidar footprints, aggregated into raster grids using quality shot filtering aligned with GEDI L4B.

Time Range

2019-04-17 to 2023-03-16

Freshness

2026-03-13 01:38:49.893787

Geography

Near-global coverage between approximately 52°N and 52°S.