Forest Carbon

Forest Carbon is Planet's global dataset of aboveground live carbon, canopy height and canopy cover. It lets carbon project developers, supply-chain teams and jurisdictions measure how much carbon forests store and how it changes, without the cost of field inventories or airborne lidar surveys. It is sold as two products. Forest Carbon Diligence is an annual 30 m archive back to 2013, modelled from Landsat 8/9 and Sentinel-2 surface reflectance and ALOS PALSAR-2 L-band radar mosaics: deep learning models trained on airborne lidar predict canopy height and cover, and models calibrated on GEDI and ICESat-2 spaceborne lidar convert them to carbon density. Forest Carbon Monitoring adds quarterly 3 m layers from Q1 2021, derived from PlanetScope surface reflectance mosaics, detailed enough to trace selective harvest of single large trees. Layers carry pixel-level uncertainty and quality information; Planet publishes its methods and validation (Anderson et al., 2025).

Planet names carbon project accounting and digital MRV, deforestation and degradation monitoring (including EU Deforestation Regulation supply-chain reporting) and reforestation monitoring as its uses. Data is delivered through Planet's Subscriptions API to the buyer's cloud storage, or hosted on Planet Insights Platform for streaming into GIS; Monitoring also includes streaming visual mosaics. It is priced per hectare ($0.10 for Diligence, $0.25 for Monitoring; both together on request) and is also available through partner platforms Lens (Upstream Tech) and Cecil. Named users include the carbon ratings agency BeZero Carbon and Laconic, which signed a multi-year, seven-figure agreement for both products in 2024.