Forest structure and plant matter on a grid (GEDI)
What it measures. Gridded measures of forest structure, including canopy height, how much of the ground the canopy covers, and the amount of plant material and biomass, across most of the globe.
How it's made. Derived from the GEDI laser instrument on the International Space Station, which bounces beams off the surface to measure ground and vegetation height, then aggregated onto 1 km, 6 km and 12 km grids.
How & where you'd use it. Useful for estimating forest carbon storage, supporting forest management, biodiversity and habitat studies, and feeding Earth system models.
What's measured
Coverage & cadence
- Time span2019-04-17 → 2023-03-16
- Measured byISS (GEDI)
- Processing levelLevel 4
- Spatial extent-180, -52.2, 180, 52.2
- FormatsCOG
- StatusCOMPLETE
What you can do with it
- Map vegetation, forests and biomass
- Monitor ecosystem productivity and carbon
- Support habitat and biodiversity studies
Official description
This dataset consists of near-global, analysis-ready, multi-resolution gridded vegetation structure metrics derived from NASA Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) Level 2 and 4A products associated with 25-m diameter lidar footprints. This dataset provides a comprehensive representation of near-global vegetation structure that is inclusive of the entire vertical profile, based solely on GEDI lidar, and validated with independent data. The GEDI sensor, mounted on the International Space Station (ISS), uses eight laser beams spaced by 60 m along-track and 600 m across-track on the Earth surface to measure ground elevation and vegetation structure between approximately 52 degrees North and South latitude. Between April 17th 2019 and March 16th 2023, GEDI acquired 11 and 7.7 billion quality waveforms suitable for measuring ground elevation and vegetation structure, respectively. This dataset provides GEDI shot metrics aggregated into raster grids at three spatial resolutions: 1 km, 6 km, and 12 km. In addition to many of the standard L2 and L4A shot metrics, several additional metrics have been derived which may be particularly useful for applications in carbon and water cycling processes in earth system models, as well as forest management, biodiversity modeling, and habitat assessment. Variables include canopy height, canopy cover, plant area index, foliage height diversity, and plant area volume density at 5 m strata. Eight statistics are included for each GEDI shot metric: mean, bootstrapped standard error of the mean, median, standard deviation, interquartile range, 95th percentile, Shannon's diversity index, and shot count. Quality shot filtering methodology that aligns with the GEDI L4B Gridded Aboveground Biomass Density, Version 2.1 was used. In comparison to the current GEDI L3 dataset, this dataset provides additional gridded metrics at multiple spatial resolutions and over several temporal periods (annual and the full mission duration). Files are provided in cloud optimized GeoTIFF format.
Get the data
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc") # free Earthdata Login
results = earthaccess.search_data(
short_name="GEDI_HighQuality_Shots_Rasters_2339",
version="1",
bounding_box=(-122.5, 37.2, -121.8, 37.9), # your area (W,S,E,N)
temporal=("2024-01-01", "2024-12-31"), # your dates
)
files = earthaccess.open(results) # stream straight from ORNL_CLOUDBrowsing CMR needs no login. Downloading or streaming bytes needs a free Earthdata Login + the earthaccess package. Official links
- Earthdata Search allows users to search, discover, visualize, refine, and access NASA Earth Observation data. GET DATA
- ORNL DAAC Data Set Documentation VIEW RELATED INFORMATION
- Gridded GEDI Vegetation Structure Metrics and Biomass Density at Multiple Resolutions: GEDI_HighQuality_Shots_Rasters.pdf VIEW RELATED INFORMATION
- Gridded GEDI Vegetation Structure Metrics and Biomass Density at Multiple Resolutions: GEDI_Gridded_ALS_validation.pdf VIEW RELATED INFORMATION