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Full catalog/Semi-Arid_Tree_Carbon_50cm_2117
Semi-Arid_Tree_Carbon_50cm_2117·v1·dataset

Carbon stored in individual dryland trees, Africa

Carbon Stocks of Individual Trees in African Drylands: Allometry and Output Data
biosphere NASA ORNL_CLOUD Level 4 multiple
In plain English

What it measures. Estimates of how much carbon is stored in nearly 10 billion individual tree crowns across the drylands of Africa, south of the Sahara. Each tree's carbon is calculated from its size as seen in very high-resolution images.

How it's made. Built by spotting individual tree crowns in 50-cm-resolution Maxar satellite images from 2002 to 2021 and converting their size into carbon using equations derived from field measurements of harvested trees.

How & where you'd use it. Lets scientists, land managers, and the public study carbon stored in scattered dryland trees down to the single-tree level, including through an online interactive map viewer.

What's measured

BIOSPHERE › VEGETATION › BIOMASSBIOSPHERE › VEGETATION › CANOPY CHARACTERISTICS

Coverage & cadence

  • Time span2002-11-01 → 2021-03-31
  • Measured byMODELS (Computer)
  • Processing levelLevel 4
  • Spatial extent-18.2, 9.4, 42.31, 24.2
  • Formatsmultiple
  • 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 allometrically-estimated carbon stocks of 9,947,310,221 tree crowns derived from 50-cm resolution satellite images within the 0 to 1000 mm/year precipitation zone of Africa north of the equator and south of the Sahara Desert. These data are presented in GeoPackage (*.gpkg) format and are summarized in Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFF (COG) format. An interactive viewer application developed to display these carbon estimates at the individual tree level across the study area is available at: https://trees.pgc.umn.edu/app. The analysis utilized 326,523 Maxar multispectral satellite images collected between 2002 to 2021 for the early dry season months of November to March to identify tree crowns. Metadata from satellite image processing across the study area are presented in Shapefile (*.shp) format. Additionally, field measurements from destructive harvests used to derive allometry equations are contained in comma-separated values (*.csv) files. These data demonstrate a new tool for studying discrete semi-arid carbon stocks at the tree level with immediate applications provided by the viewer application. Uncertainty of carbon estimates are +/- 19.8%.

Get the data

semi-arid_tree_carbon_50cm_2117_access.py
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc")          # free Earthdata Login

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="Semi-Arid_Tree_Carbon_50cm_2117",
    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.