A high-resolution canopy height model of the Earth

The worldwide variation in vegetation height is fundamental to the global carbon cycle and central to the functioning of ecosystems and their biodiversity. Geospatially explicit and, ideally, highly resolved information is required to manage terrestrial ecosystems, mitigate climate change and prevent biodiversity loss. Here we present a comprehensive global canopy height map at 10 m ground sampling distance for the year 2020. We have developed a probabilistic deep learning model that fuses sparse height data from the Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) space-borne LiDAR mission with dense optical satellite images from Sentinel-2. This model retrieves canopy-top height from Sentinel-2 images anywhere…

• NA
  National Aeronautics and Space Administration
• VF
  Villum Fonden

  Award: 34306
• NR
  National Research Foundation
• DG
  Danmarks Grundforskningsfond
• ET
  Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich