GEDI launches a new era of biomass inference from space
2022
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
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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