North American Boreal Forest Tree Cover Change Trends 2000-2019

Two geospatial maps show annual tree cover trends across North American boreal forests from 2000 to 2019. Pixel values represent the percentage change per year, derived from MODIS Vegetation Continuous Field data and analyzed using Theil-Sen's slope estimation. The dataset was created by Ronny Rotbarth of Wageningen University & Research and published in a 2023 Nature Communications paper.

Use Cases

• Analyzing regional patterns of forest loss or gain based on the annual trend maps
• Assessing the impact of climate change on boreal ecosystems based on the 20-year trend data
• Validating ecological models using the statistically significant trend map
• Monitoring forest health and carbon stock changes based on tree cover percentage trends

Strengths

• Covers a 20-year time series from 2000 to 2019
• Includes two map products: one with all data points and one masking non-significant trends
• Uses a rigorous statistical method (Theil-Sen's slope with Yue-Pilon pre-whitening) for trend analysis
• Has a defined spatial resolution of approximately 1,000 meters

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment
• Data may reflect geographic bias inherent to the paperswithcode platform

Provenance

Source

Wageningen University & Research

Collection Method

Trends quantified per pixel using Theil-Sen's slope estimation on MODIS Vegetation Continuous Field version 6 product data.

Time Range

2000-2019

Geography

North American boreal forests (within biome boundary from Gauthier et al. 2015 plus a 120km buffer)