A high-resolution canopy height model of the Earth

By Nico Lang, Walter Jetz, Konrad Schindler, Jan Dirk Wegner. Nature Ecology & Evolution, 2022

605 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The worldwide variation in vegetation height is fundamental to the global carbon cycle and central to the functioning of ecosystems and their biodiversity. Geospatially explicit and, ideally, highly resolved information is required to manage terrestrial ecosystems, mitigate climate change and prevent biodiversity loss. Here we present a comprehensive global canopy height map at 10 m ground sampling distance for the year 2020. We have developed a probabilistic deep learning model that fuses sparse height data from the Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) space-borne LiDAR mission with dense optical satellite images from Sentinel-2. This model retrieves canopy-top height from Sentinel-2 images anywhere on Earth and quantifies the uncertainty in these estimates. Our approach improves the retrieval of tall canopies with typically high carbon stocks. According to our map, only 5% of the global landmass is covered by trees taller than 30 m. Further, we find that only 34% of these tall canopies are located within protected areas. Thus, the approach can serve ongoing efforts in forest conservation and has the potential to foster advances in climate, carbon and biodiversity modelling. Using a deep learning approach, the authors outline a global canopy height map at 10-m resolution combining publicly available optical satellite images and space-borne LiDAR and show that only 5% of the global landmass is covered by trees taller than 30 m.

Subfields: Ecology, Environmental Engineering, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d745e6ffb484bc8394f2d20734b27725d65493ef

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Ecology

1. Tirthankar Chakraborty
2. T. Simensen
3. G. Singh
4. David N. Barton
5. Zander S. Venter

In Environmental Engineering

1. Tirthankar Chakraborty
2. T. Simensen
3. G. Singh
4. David N. Barton
5. Zander S. Venter
6. T. Johns

In Global and Planetary Change

1. Tirthankar Chakraborty
2. James M. Tolan
3. T. Johns

Citations in the corpus

• Very high resolution canopy height maps from RGB imagery using self-supervised vision transformer and convolutional decoder trained on aerial lidar (2023, methodology): “Other works have produced regional 10-meter CHMs utilizing Sentinel-2 and aerial lidar (Astola et al., 2021; Fayad et al., 2023).”
• Global 10 m Land Use Land Cover Datasets: A Comparison of Dynamic World, World Cover and Esri Land Cover (2022, methodology): “, 2022 [41] use GEDI reference data at 25 m but produce a tree canopy height model at a 10 m resolution.”