The Global 30m Forest Age Map (Natural vs. Planted forest)
Description
The Global 30m Forest Age Map (Natural vs. Planted Forest), 1985–2024 provides a worldwide, high-resolution dataset that separately maps the ages of natural and planted forests. Forest age is derived from Landsat time-series spectral change points using the CCDC algorithm. The dataset reveals global and regional patterns of forest development and offers a consistent basis for studies on forest dynamics, carbon cycles, and ecosystem management. In the data files, those beginning with NF correspond to natural forests, while those beginning with PF correspond to planted forests. Due to the large volume of the dataset, a portion of the data files is hosted on an additional storage platform. These externally hosted files form part of the same dataset and are fully associated with the same DOI as the files stored on Mendeley Data. The additional files can be accessed at the following link: https://zenodo.org/records/17636330.
Files
Steps to reproduce
The Global 30m Forest Age Map (1985–2024) was generated using Landsat surface reflectance time-series data (Collection 2) processed on the Google Earth Engine (GEE) platform. We applied the Continuous Change Detection and Classification (CCDC) algorithm to extract long-term spectral trajectories and identify change points corresponding to forest disturbance and regrowth events. Forest age was then estimated as the time elapsed since the most recent spectral change point. Forest extent and forest type information were derived from existing global forest distribution and natural–planted forest datasets, which were used to mask forest pixels and distinguish natural forests (NF) from planted forests (PF) before age estimation. The final forest age products were exported as GeoTIFF (.tif) files at 30 m spatial resolution. Separate files were generated for natural forests (prefixed with NF) and planted forests (prefixed with PF), each containing pixel-level forest age estimates for the period 1985–2024.
Institutions
- China Agricultural University