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.
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Citation is critically important for dataset documentation and discovery. This dataset is openly shared, without restriction, in accordance with the EOSDIS Data Use and Citation Guidance.
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GENERAL DOCUMENTATION | An Unexpectedly Large Count of Trees in the West African Sahara and Sahel: gpkg_to_esri.py | |
GENERAL DOCUMENTATION | An Unexpectedly Large Count of Trees in the West African Sahara and Sahel: Non-Forest_Trees_Sahara_Sahel.pdf | |
USER'S GUIDE | ORNL DAAC Data Set Documentation |