Environmental Research Letters (Jan 2022)

GEDI launches a new era of biomass inference from space

  • Ralph Dubayah,
  • John Armston,
  • Sean P Healey,
  • Jamis M Bruening,
  • Paul L Patterson,
  • James R Kellner,
  • Laura Duncanson,
  • Svetlana Saarela,
  • Göran Ståhl,
  • Zhiqiang Yang,
  • Hao Tang,
  • J Bryan Blair,
  • Lola Fatoyinbo,
  • Scott Goetz,
  • Steven Hancock,
  • Matthew Hansen,
  • Michelle Hofton,
  • George Hurtt,
  • Scott Luthcke

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ac8694
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 17, no. 9
p. 095001

Abstract

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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 CO _2 . 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.

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