Leaf Area Index 2013-2024 (raster 20m, 300m), Ground-Based Observations for Validation project sites - version 3.5.0, Dec 2025

LAI corresponds to the one-sided leaf area per unit of ground surface area and describes the amount of leaf material in a vegetation canopy.

The GBOV service (Ground-Based Observations for Validation) is a project funded by the European Commission. Its objective is to provide analysis-ready validation data to support the evaluation of Earth Observation products. The core aim of GBOV is to generate upscaled products derived from ground-based measurements.

This dataset consists of Land Products (LPs) generated using Digital Hemispherical Photographs (DHP) collected from in-situ stations located in North America, Europe, Australia, and Asia. These DHPs are used to extract ground measurements of LAI over Experimental Sample Units (ESUs) provided in the "Leaf Area Index Reference Measurements 2013-2024 (20m), Ground-Based Observations for Validation project sites - version 2.0, Dec 2025" dataset. ESU size is comparable to the spatial resolution of Sentinel-2 Level 2 surface reflectance products, which are used for the upscaling.

Each Land Product is distributed at two spatial resolutions: one matching the Sentinel-2 Level 2 surface reflectance resolution (~20 m), and one aggregated to the Copernicus Global Land Service (CGLS) resolution (~300 m).