Trees & Forests

Trees & Forests is terraPulse's suite of global forest data layers for organisations that need a consistent, long-term record of where forest exists, how it has changed and how old it is, over areas and time spans that field inventories cannot cover.

The suite is based on time-serial maps of tree cover: the percentage of each pixel covered by woody vegetation taller than 3 to 5 metres. terraPulse produces these by applying machine learning to satellite imagery, calibrated to reference data. Its 2025 product guide states the layers run from 1984 at up to 30-metre resolution and from 2017 on at 10-metre resolution; terraPulse's peer-reviewed method builds the historical record from the Landsat archive, and its 2022 launch of the 10-metre layers drew on the European Space Agency's public archive.

• Standard layers: tree cover, deciduous and evergreen tree cover, forest cover, forest loss and gain (with a significance probability), and forest stand age (years since establishment or detected gain), with global extent and previous-year latency.
• 1-metre tree layer: a binary tree layer from the terraPulse Land Cover dataset where high-resolution imagery exists.
• Stated uncertainty: RMSE for continuous layers and class-membership probability for categorical ones.
• Delivery: SFTP, the terraServe API (GeoJSON, CSV, SHP or TIFF; XYZ map tiles for GIS tools) and the terraView dashboard.

terraPulse lists forestry and carbon uses including carbon-market reference and activity levels, monitoring thinning, harvest and growth, wood-basket estimates and fire and flood risk. Published case studies include Enviva Biomass verifying reforestation in its supply chain, Belize monitoring forest change, and the Philippines' Forest Management Bureau setting forest reference emission levels.