Forest Canopy Height Globally Mapped with Spaceborne Lidar

This data set provides a global map of forest canopy height at 1�km spatial resolution derived from 2005 data from the Geoscience Laser Altimeter System (GLAS) aboard ICESat (Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite), global ancillary variables, and environmental modeling. Because the GLAS lidar shots provide an incomplete coverage of the Earth, producing the wall�to�wall map required exploiting the relationship between footprint level lidar�derived canopy height estimates and spatially continuous ancillary variables. These ancillary data included the MOD44B percent tree cover product [Hansen et al., 2003] from the Moderate
Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS), elevation from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) [Farr et al., 2007], as well as climatology maps from the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) [Kummerow et al., 1998] and Worldclim database [Hijmans et al., 2005]. All ancillary variables were resampled to bring the resolution of the output wall�to�wall map to 1�km. The resulting map reveals regional forest canopy height gradients as well as coarse disturbance patterns. The results were validated with field measurements from 66 FLUXNET (http://fluxnet.ornl.gov/) sites and compared against another forest canopy height product [Lefsky, 2010]. For details about map construction, please see Simard, M., N. Pinto, J. Fisher, and A. Baccini. 2011. Mapping forest canopy height globally with spaceborne lidar, Journal of Geophysical Research 116(G04021): 1-12. doi:10.1029/2011JG001708