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Full catalog/GEDI_L4B_Country_Biomass_2321
GEDI_L4B_Country_Biomass_2321·v1·dataset

Country-by-country totals of forest plant weight (GEDI)

GEDI L4B Country-level Summaries of Aboveground Biomass
biosphere NASA ORNL_CLOUD Level 4 CSV
In plain English

What it measures. Country-by-country totals and averages of aboveground forest biomass (the weight of living plant material above the soil), along with estimates of how uncertain those figures are.

How it's made. Summarized from NASA's GEDI laser instrument on the International Space Station, which scans the 3D structure of forests, and compared against national forest-inventory figures from the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization.

How & where you'd use it. Useful for comparing forest carbon stocks across countries and for supporting national reporting and climate-related forest assessments.

What's measured

BIOSPHERE › VEGETATION › BIOMASS

Coverage & cadence

  • Time span2019-04-18 → 2023-03-16
  • Measured byCOMPUTERS (Computer) · ISS (GEDI)
  • Processing levelLevel 4
  • Spatial extent-180, -52, 180, 52
  • FormatsCSV
  • 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 provides country-level estimates of land surface mean aboveground biomass density (AGBD), total aboveground biomass (AGB) stocks, and the associated standard errors of the mean calculated using different versions of the Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) Level-4B (L4B) product. The GEDI L4B product provides gridded (1 km x 1 km) estimates of AGBD within the GEDI orbital extent (between 51.6 degrees N and 51.6 degrees S). For comparison purposes, this dataset also includes national-scale National Forest Inventory (NFI) estimates of AGBD from the 2020 Global Forest Resources Assessment (FRA) published by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO, 2020) of the United Nations. The GEDI instrument produces high-resolution laser ranging observations of the 3-dimensional structure of the Earth's surface. GEDI was launched on December 5, 2018, and is attached to the International Space Station (ISS). The GEDI instrument consists of three lasers producing a total of eight beam ground transects, which consist of ~25 m footprint samples spaced approximately every 60 m along-track. The GEDI beam transects are spaced approximately 600 m apart on the Earth's surface in the cross-track direction, for an across-track width of ~4.2 km. The data are provided in comma-separated value (CSV) format.

Get the data

gedi_l4b_country_biomass_2321_access.py
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc")          # free Earthdata Login

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="GEDI_L4B_Country_Biomass_2321",
    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_CLOUD
Browsing CMR needs no login. Downloading or streaming bytes needs a free Earthdata Login + the earthaccess package.