A view from space monitors land cover and tree to track aboveground biomass and carbon content

Read more about taking stock of global biomass maps

The Biomass Harmonization Activity

Trees and other plants pull vast amounts of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere every year, incorporating some of that carbon into their organic structure, what Earth scientists call plant biomass. Measuring and monitoring the size and changes in this biomass carbon is an important part of the Paris Agreement on climate change. If a forest is cut down, for example, the carbon stored in those trees will count towards that country’s annual carbon emissions.

As part of the Paris Agreement, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) will take stock of the best available information on aboveground biomass carbon in 2023, as part of their “Global Stocktake.” The Global Stocktake will set benchmarks for how much biomass carbon exists on land. The UNFCCC will use these benchmarks to track countries’ progress toward meeting Paris Agreement targets.

Satellites can monitor land cover and tree height to provide reliable estimates of aboveground biomass and carbon content. Mapping aboveground biomass is a priority of several ongoing, new, and upcoming NASA, ESA, and JAXA satellite missions. These include several ongoing missions:

Copernicus Sentinel-1 (two polar-orbiting satellites),
Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation , aka GEDI (measures Earth's forests and topography),
Ice, Cloud, and Land Elevation Satellite-2 , aka ICESat-2, (measures ice sheet elevation and sea ice thickness), and
Advanced Land Observing Satellite-2 , aka ALOS-2 (provides information related to disasters, regional and global environmental issues).

These missions will be joined by the upcoming ALOS-4, BIOMASS, and NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) missions in the coming years.

A primary purpose of these missions is to provide biomass density maps that can be used in forest carbon estimation and the management of forest and land use for climate mitigation purposes. Currently, national greenhouse gas estimation and reporting typically depend on either national forest inventories (NFIs) or other sparse, incomplete forest plot data.

Spaceborne satellite missions will soon provide globally consistent measurements of forests that can be used to estimate biomass. However, different space missions using different sensors and technologies (e.g., radar, lidar) often produce different estimates of biomass. Such disparities are a potential source of confusion, so it is highly desirable to produce a single most accurate biomass dataset by combining the strengths of the individual sensors.

The world’s Earth observation biomass community is undertaking a collaboration aimed at resolving discrepancies between space missions and producing harmonized estimates of biomass and uncertainty at a policy-relevant, jurisdictional-level scale.

Existing Biomass Products

Several current projects are producing continental- to global-scale biomass maps. These include:

ESA’s CCI-Biomass global maps at a scale of 100 meters for the years 2010, 2017, 2018, and 2020;
JPL’s global 100 meter map for 2020 and a time series of 10 kilometer biomass maps from 2000 through 2020;
NASA GEDI’s 1 kilometer map for 2020 covering latitudes between approximately 52° N and 52° S;
NASA’s ICESat-2 30 meter boreal map for 2020; and
The UK National Centre for Earth Observation (EO) 100 meter time series of maps for Africa from 2007 to 2017.

Key global biomass production and validation teams, including national experts, are engaged in this effort. These teams share the goal of producing harmonized biomass products for use in the UNFCCC Global Stocktake process.

Explore Datasets

The map illustrates the NCEO Africa Aboveground Woody Biomass (AGB) map for the year 2017 at 100 m spatial resolution which was developed using a combination of LiDAR, Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) and optical based data. This product was developed by the UK’s National Centre for Earth Observation (NCEO) through the Carbon Cycle and Official Development Assistance (ODA) programmes. For more information see CEOS biomass.

On the EXPLORE DATASETS section of this dashboard you can discover several other datasets related to biomass and terrestrial carbon: