The Global Canopy Atlas: analysis-ready maps of 3D structure for the world’s woody ecosystems

作者：Fabian Jörg Fischer, Rebecca Banbury Morgan, Toby Jackson, Jérôme Chave, David Coomes, K. C. Cushman, Ricardo Dalagnol, Michele Dalponte, Laura Duncanson, Sassan Saatchi, Rupert Seidl, Krzysztof Stereńczak, Gaia Vaglio Laurin, Stephen Adu‐Bredu, Jesús Aguirre‐Gutiérrez, Benedetta Antonielli, John Armston, Mauro Assis, Nicolas Barbier, Andrew Burt, Ricardo G. César, Jaroslav Červenka, Nicholas C. Coops, Laury Cullen, James W. Dalling, Andrew B. Davies, Miro Demol, Jakob Ebenbeck, Fabian Ewald Fassnacht, Temilola Fatoyinbo, Mariano Garcı́a, Ignácio Gasparri, Terje Gobakken, Tristan R.H. Goodbody, Eric Bastos Görgens, Tolga Görüm, Carl R. Gosper, Hongcan Guan, Janne Heiskanen, Marco Heurich, Martina L. Hobi, Bernhard Höfle, A. Hooijer, Andreas Huth, Alexander Kedrov, James R. Kellner, S. Koenig, Kamil Král, Misha Krassovski, Helga U. Kuechly, Martin Krůček, Kyaw Kyaw Htoo, Nicolas Labrière, Daphne Teck Ching Lai, Johannes Larson, Hjalmar Laudon, Dawn Lemke, Jonathan Lenoir, Yadvinder Malhi, Owais Ahmed Malik, Maxence Martin, Iain M. McNicol, Milutin Milenković, David Minor, Edward T. A. Mitchard, Vítězslav Moudrý, Helene C. Muller‐Landau, Erik Næsset, Anuttara Nathalang, Jean Pierre Ometto, Masanori Onishi, Yusuke Onoda, Petri Pellikka, Henrik Persson, Matheus Pinheiro Ferreira, Pierre Ploton, Suzanne M. Prober, Md. Farhadur Rahman, Parvez Rana, Maxime Réjou‐Méchain, Jannika Schäfer, Cornelius Senf, Aurélie Shapiro, Dmitry Schepaschenko, Guochun Shen, Miles R. Silman, Thiago Cavalcante Lins Silva, Jenia Singh, Ferry Slik, Jonas Stillhard, Anto Subash, Ryuichi Takeshige, Shengli Tao, Evan Tenorio, Timo Tokola, Piotr Tompalski, Nitin Kumar Tripathi, Rubén Valbuena, Riccardo Valentini, Ronald Vernimmen, Grégoire Vincent, Jörgen Wallerman, Wan Shafrina Wan Mohd Jaafar, Yongcai Wang, Hannah Weiser, Joanne C. White, Lukas Winiwarter, Michael A. Wulder, Zuoqiang Yuan, Katherine Zdunic, Yelu Zeng, Houxi Zhang, Jian Zhang, Zhiming Zhang, Tommaso Jucker · 发表于：bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) · 年份：2025 · DOI：10.1101/2025.08.31.673375 · 被引用次数：4 · 研究领域：Remote Sensing and LiDAR Applications

Abstract Woody canopies regulate exchanges of energy, water and carbon, and their three-dimensional (3D) structure supports much of terrestrial biodiversity. Remote sensing technologies such as airborne laser scanning (ALS) now enable the 3D mapping of entire landscapes. However, we lack the large, harmonized and geographically representative ALS collections needed to build a global picture of woody ecosystem structure. To address this challenge, we developed the Global Canopy Atlas (GCA): 3,458 ALS acquisitions transformed into standardized and analysis-ready maps of canopy height and elevation at 1 m 2 resolution. The GCA covers 56,554 km 2 across all major biomes. 19% of this area has been scanned multiple times, and 87% of all GCA products are openly available, covering 95% of the total area. To showcase its wide range of applications, we applied the GCA in three case studies. First, we validated three global satellite-derived canopy height maps, finding poor performance at native resolution (1-30 m, R 2 < 0.38) and moderate performance at 250 m resolution (R 2 < 0.65). Second, analyzing global patterns in canopy gap size frequency we discovered an unexpectedly large variation of power law exponents from branch to stand level (α = 1.52 to 2.38), pointing to a fundamental scale-dependence of forest structure. Third, we developed a framework to standardize forest turnover quantification from multi-source, multi-temporal ALS. In a temperate forest in North America it r...