An Unexpectedly Large Count of Trees in the West African Sahara and Sahel

Description

This dataset provides georeferenced polygon vectors of individual tree canopy geometries for dryland areas in West African Sahara and Sahel that were derived using deep learning applied to 50-cm resolution satellite imagery. More than 1.8 billion non-forest trees (i.e., woody plants with a crown size over 3 m2) over about 1.3 million km2 were identified from panchromatic and pansharpened normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) images at 0.5-m spatial resolution using an automatic tree detection framework based on supervised deep-learning techniques. Combined with existing and future fieldwork, these data lay the foundation for a comprehensive database that contains information on all individual trees outside of forests and could provide accurate estimates of woody carbon in arid and semi-arid areas throughout the Earth for the first time.

Resources

Name Format Description Link
34 The tree density per hectare is shown for different crown size classes: (a) 3-15 m2, (b) 15-50 m2, (c) 50-200 m2, (d) >200 m2. Source: Brandt et al. (2020) https://daac.ornl.gov/VEGETATION/guides/Non-Forest_Trees_Sahara_Sahel_Fig1.png
21 Search results for publications that cite this dataset by its DOI. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=10.3334%2FORNLDAAC%2F1832
21 Data set Landing Page DOI URL https://doi.org/10.3334/ORNLDAAC/1832
21 ORNL DAAC Data Set Documentation https://daac.ornl.gov/VEGETATION/guides/Non-Forest_Trees_Sahara_Sahel.html
21 This link allows direct data access via Earthdata login https://daac.ornl.gov/daacdata/global_vegetation/Non-Forest_Trees_Sahara_Sahel/
21 An Unexpectedly Large Count of Trees in the West African Sahara and Sahel: gpkg_to_esri.py https://data.ornldaac.earthdata.nasa.gov/public/global_vegetation/Non-Forest_Trees_Sahara_Sahel/comp/gpkg_to_esri.py
33 An Unexpectedly Large Count of Trees in the West African Sahara and Sahel: Non-Forest_Trees_Sahara_Sahel.pdf https://data.ornldaac.earthdata.nasa.gov/public/global_vegetation/Non-Forest_Trees_Sahara_Sahel/comp/Non-Forest_Trees_Sahara_Sahel.pdf

Tags

  • ecosystems
  • biosphere
  • vegetation
  • earth-science

Topics

Categories