GEDI launches a new era of biomass inference from space

By R. Dubayah, John Armston, Sean P. Healey, Jamis M. Bruening, P. Patterson, J. Kellner, L. Duncanson, Svetlana Saarela, Göran Ståhl, Zhiqiang Yang and 9 more. Environmental Research Letters, 2022

206 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Accurate estimation of aboveground forest biomass stocks is required to assess the impacts of land use changes such as deforestation and subsequent regrowth on concentrations of atmospheric CO2. The Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) is a lidar mission launched by NASA to the International Space Station in 2018. GEDI was specifically designed to retrieve vegetation structure within a novel, theoretical sampling design that explicitly quantifies biomass and its uncertainty across a variety of spatial scales. In this paper we provide the estimates of pan-tropical and temperate biomass derived from two years of GEDI observations. We present estimates of mean biomass densities at 1 km resolution, as well as estimates aggregated to the national level for every country GEDI observes, and at the sub-national level for the United States. For all estimates we provide the standard error of the mean biomass. These data serve as a baseline for current biomass stocks and their future changes, and the mission’s integrated use of formal statistical inference points the way towards the possibility of a new generation of powerful monitoring tools from space.

Subfields: Ecology, Environmental Engineering, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ef318d7815ea5e12db4846a025c6f7fe29c8eb2d

Citations in the corpus

• A high-resolution canopy height model of the Earth (2022, unknown): “In the context of the GEDI mission goals 12 , our presented canopy height map may be used to fill the gaps in the gridded products at 1-km resolution where no GEDI tracks are available 43,44 .”