NASA Releases Breakthrough Forest Biomass-Carbon Product

NASA's GEDI mission has reached a major milestone with the release of its newest data product, which provides the first near-global estimate of aboveground forest biomass and the carbon it stores – filling a key gap in climate research.

The data enables research into how Earth's forests are changing, what role they play in mitigating climate change, and the regional and global impacts of planting and cutting down trees.

Counting carbon in Earth's forests

GEDI is a high-resolution lidar instrument designed specifically to measure vegetation. From its vantage point aboard the International Space Station, GEDI rapidly bounces laser pulses off the trees and shrubs below to create detailed 3D maps of forests and land formations. The resulting data product, processed and gridded at a 1-km resolution, allows researchers to study questions about forest ecosystems, animal habitats, carbon content, and climate change.

In its first three years in orbit, GEDI has captured billions of measurements between 51.6 degrees north and south latitudes.

"One big area of uncertainty is that we don't know how much carbon is stored in the Earth's forests," said Ralph Dubayah, GEDI's principal investigator and a professor of geographical sciences at the University of Maryland. Trees pull carbon from the atmosphere to fuel their growth. But scientists need to know how much carbon forests store so they can predict how much will be released by deforestation or wildfires. Approximately half of plant biomass is composed of carbon.

GEDI's new product is not the first global biomass product, but it is the first to include well-described uncertainty for its estimates using advanced statistical models. "That is, for each 1-kilometer estimate of average biomass, the mission knows how confident that estimate is," Dubayah said.

The GEDI team has compared their results to forest inventories from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and U.S. Forest Service Forest Inventory and Analysis data, and found that GEDI's biomass estimates compared favorably to both.

"We can apply this framework to estimate biomass for entire countries – for example, many countries in the pan-tropical regions don't have national forest inventories," said John Armston, GEDI's lead for validation and calibration. "Now we have the means to provide an estimate of aboveground biomass with known uncertainty that can be used to support climate reporting and a broad range of applications."

"Resolving the structure of different forest and woodland ecosystems with much more certainty will benefit, not only carbon stock estimation, but also our understanding of their ecological condition and the impact of different land management practices," he said.

Laying a foundation for future missions

"Eventually, the best products won't just be based on GEDI, but on a combination of satellite data sources," said Laura Duncanson, an assistant professor at the University of Maryland and one of GEDI's research scientists.

What this means for a Legal Reserve

A global biomass map answers a planet-scale question: how much carbon do forests store? Someone supporting a reserve asks a smaller, more direct one: is my hectare protected?

The two scales complement each other. Global products like GEDI's help explain what a forest is worth; local monitoring shows whether that particular forest still exists. At Neutraza, the second is the focus: every reserve has its official CAR boundary, satellite imagery clipped to exactly that polygon, and a public history of analyses.

That combination — official property data, recent imagery and an auditable trail — is what turns a hectare of Legal Reserve into something you can verify.

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Source: NASA Releases Breakthrough Forest Biomass-Carbon Product. Public domain text and image from a U.S. government agency.