Land vegetation is a large carbon store and represents opportunities to sequester additional carbon. While many Earth Observation missions aim to estimate forest carbon from space, their calibration and validation is critical. Ultimately, trust in biomass maps requires accurate ground data. Supporting ground measurements and the people who make them is thus mission-critical for mapping and tracking Earth’s forest carbon. Building on decades of work from the global research community with a strong representation of partners from the Global South, the GEO-TREES initiative aims to fund high quality ground data from a global network of long-term forest inventories, and to make these data open access. DATA.GEO-TREES is the data portal of the GEO-TREES initiative. It includes above ground biomass and canopy height data based on plot inventories and on airborne laser scanning.
The most recent data may be downloaded directly on the map. Alternatively, users may use the DATA.GEO-TREES application programming interface (API).
Raw data can only be accessed through the site PIs or the network partners - see plot meta data for contact details.
Find here the link to the Data Format Reference Document (forthcoming)
The Data User agrees to include the following acknowledgment in any publication where the GEO-TREES Data were used: “This study was made possible by using data from GEO-TREES, accessed through the data.geo-trees.org portal. We acknowledge the work of the many field workers and technicians involved in the acquisition, curation, and maintenance of the data.”
GEO-TREES kindly requests that Data Users share an electronic copy of any publication that utilizes GEO-TREES Data. This can be done by providing a DOI link or sending the publication directly to GEO-TREES. Sharing these publications helps GEO-TREES track the impact and usage of the data, contributing to the initiative's mission of enhancing the understanding and monitoring of forests.
Data Users are strongly encouraged to contact Data Owners and Data Providers to interpret their results and inform Data Owners and Data Providers about the use of their data. This will help integrating the Data Owners and Data Providers and will contribute to the initiative's mission of building a fair and equitable use of GEO-TREES Data.
Contact details of the Data Owners and Data Providers can be found in the meta data of each plot.
DATA.GEO-TREES was launched in 2023 as a follow-up of the Forest Observation System (FOS), created in 2016, a project led by Dmitry Schepaschenko (IIASA) and Jérôme Chave (Toulouse University). The original goal of the project was to store high-quality aboveground biomass data and make them openly available to users. The legacy data included in the FOS are still available below, but DATA.GEO-TREES is now the main data portal for the GEO-TREES initiative. For information about DATA.GEO-TREES please contact:
Dr. Dmitry Schepaschenko
International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, IIASA
Schlossplatz 1, 2361
Laxenburg, Austria
Dr. Jérôme Chave
Université Toulouse, CNRS
118 route de Narbonne, 31062
Toulouse, France
The reference for the FOS is:
Schepaschenko, D., Chave, J., Phillips, O.L. et al. The Forest Observation System, building a global reference dataset for remote sensing of forest biomass. Sci Data 6, 198 (2019).
The FOS data:
Schepaschenko, D. et al. A global reference dataset for remote sensing of forest biomass. The Forest Observation System approach. IIASA, https://doi.org/10.22022/ESM/03-2019.38 (2019).
The DATA.GEO-TREES digital infrastructure is currently funded by the European Space Agency.