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The authors conduct a national inventory on individual tree carbon stocks in Rwanda using aerial imagery and deep learning. Most mapped trees are located in farmlands; new methods allow partitioning to any landscape categories, effective planning and optimization of carbon sequestration and the economic benefits of trees.

Tracking vegetation change in sub-Saharan Africa between 1992 and 2011, the authors reveal contrasting patterns in woody cover between drylands and humid zones, with decreases in both areas associated with high human population growth.

Changing rainfall patterns may drive changes in the structure of tropical savanna. Here Zhang et al. use satellite data from global tropical savannas, and find evidence to suggest that altered rainfall may be favouring woody plants over herbaceous plants in these ecosystems.

Trees enrich cities, contributing to urban ecosystems and to the health of urban populations. This study quantifies urban tree coverage in all major Chinese cities, finding that greening efforts are successful but that certain mega-cities are benefiting more.

This paper uses satellite data from 2001 to 2022 to analyze soil exposure in croplands. It shows that while soil exposure duration declined in 57% of croplands, 86% face more climate extremes, threatening soil health.

Drought, fires, and human activities have reversed the accumulation of live biomass carbon in the Northern Hemisphere, with total biomass shifting from a positive to a negative trend around 2016.

Sub-metre-resolution satellite imagery is used to identify the presence of nearly 2.8 million baobab trees in the Sahel, with 94% of rural buildings in Senegal having at least one baobab tree in their immediate surroundings. The abundance of baobabs is associated with a higher likelihood of people consuming highly nutritious dark green leafy vegetables.

The authors develop a machine learning-based approach to derive abrupt shift probability in dryland ecosystem functioning in the Sudano–Sahel. They highlight areas with high probabilities of abrupt shifts in the near future (2025), which are linked to long-term rainfall trends.

This study shows that global warming has had an overall positive effect on boreal tree species diversity over recent decades, but a negative effect in areas of extreme warming, with substantial implications for the productivity and temporal stability of boreal forest ecosystems.

Agroforestry practices represent important natural climate solutions, in addition to providing a variety of socioecological benefits. This study evaluates spatiotemporal agroforestry patterns in India by tracking the fate of large farmland trees over the past decade.

Recent analyses have suggested that tree cover in non-forest ecosystems may be much higher than expected. Here, the authors map tree cover down to the individual tree level for the entire continent of Africa and find that almost 30% is found outside areas classified as forests.

China has pledged to achieve carbon neutrality by 2060 but policies favouring urbanization could slow down progress. This study tests the hypothesis that urbanization and carbon neutrality are not mutually exclusive and that sustainably managed urbanization could increase carbon sequestration, especially in rural areas.

A decade of satellite observations suggests that old, degraded and deforested tropical forests are almost carbon neutral whereas northern young forests are the biggest contributor to the rising amount of carbon stored globally in vegetation.

Drylands are under pressure from climate change and population growth. This study finds the sensitivity of dryland vegetation to rainfall changing, with opposite effects in poorer and richer nations.

Deep learning was used to map the crown sizes of each tree in the West African Sahara, Sahel and sub-humid zone using submetre-resolution satellite imagery, revealing a relatively high density of trees in arid areas.

Rubber tree plantations have been displacing tropical forests in Southeast Asia, linked to global rubber prices. Forest-to-plantation conversion in Cambodia is correlated with shifts in rubber prices, with a time lag of under a year, showing the link between global commodity markets and deforestation in developing nations.

Low-frequency passive microwave data (L-VOD) allow quantification of biomass change in sub-Saharan Africa between 2010 and 2016, revealing climate-induced carbon losses, particularly in drylands.

Combining Earth observation data and dynamic global vegetation models, the authors show that anthropogenic land use and land cover change has caused a reduction in the contribution to the terrestrial carbon sink for tropical forests but an increase for boreal forests between 1992 and 2015.

Low-frequency vegetation optical depth (L-VOD) sensing reveals global patterns of seasonal variations in ecosystem-scale plant water storage and relationships with leaf phenology; results vary between tropical and temperate–boreal zones.

The authors show a recent decoupling of the tropical temperature variations and the carbon cycle that is driven by wetter conditions in the tropics.

Carbon sequestration by Siberian forests has been low over the past decade due to disturbances that have decreased live biomass and increased dead wood, according to passive microwave observations.

A database and viewer is described, resulting from the assessment of the carbon stock of over 9 billion individual trees in semi-arid sub-Saharan Africa using field data, machine learning, satellite data and high-performance computing.

Lakes are essential components of the hydrological and biogeochemical cycles. Here, Pi et al develop a global lake dataset called GLAKES via high-resolution satellite images and deep learning to examine global lake changes over four decades.

Conflicts pose a serious threat to food security. Using remote sensing, this study reveals the location and extent of war-related cropland abandonment and its impact on food insecurity in South Sudan from 2016 to 2018—and offers a basis for timely aid provision.

Woody components of tropical forests have a slower recovery rate from severe drought compared to upper canopies and leaves, according to multiple remote sensing observations across the tropics during the El Niño-induced drought of 2015-2016

Farmland management promotes tree cover around villages in the semi-arid Sahel of West Africa, according to analyses of satellite imagery. This implies that a higher population density does not always lead to reduced tree cover.

Forest management may play an important role in climate change mitigation. Here, Tong et al. combine remote sensing and machine learning modelling to map forest cover dynamics in southern China during 2002–2017, showing effects on carbon sequestration that are extensive but of uncertain longevity and possible negative impact on soil water.

Since the early 1980s, remotely sensed data has shown the Earth to be slowly greening. Climate change, CO₂ fertilization and land-use change are competing explanations. Using satellite data from 2000–2017, this study finds striking greening of both China and India, driven primarily by land-use change, with forest growth and cropland intensification more important in China and cropland more important in India.

Since 2000, China has attempted to vegetate huge portions of eroded landscape in its south west, bordering Vietman, Laos, and Myanmar. This study finds that this ecological engineering is combating desertification as vegetation regrows and stores carbon.

Greenhouses are quickly proliferating in response to the world’s increasing demand for food, but information on their precise location, distribution and extent remains limited in many countries. This Analysis combines global very-high-resolution satellite imagery and artificial intelligence to address this knowledge gap, showing a dramatic increase in greenhouse coverage in the Global South.

Tropical carbon stocks are essential for proper accounting of global carbon budgets, but difficult to monitor on a large scale. L-band microwave observations used here enable direct and spatially explicit accounting of annual carbon fluxes from different types of land surface.

Trees are crucial for Earth’s ecosystems, aiding in carbon absorption, climate regulation and biodiversity support. High-resolution satellite sensors and artificial intelligence enable detailed tree monitoring at national and continental levels, simplifying biomass assessment, national reporting and climate change mitigation efforts.

A strong link between stand structure and primary productivity is pervasively found in forests across the pantropical region, according to an analysis of GEDI lidar data and Sentinel remote sensing imagery.

Dryland vegetation resistance to aridity is influenced by local environmental conditions, including plant richness, soil moisture dynamics and texture, and drought history, according to field observations and satellite remote sensing data across five continents from 2000 to 2022.

Climate change may have less negative impact on terrestrial ecosystem productivity as vegetation growth adapts to climatic warming, increasing optimal temperature from 1982 to 2016, according to evidence from satellite-derived ecosystem productivity, climate variables, and ecosystem simulations.

Over the past decade, agroforestry and restoration of degraded forests increased the number of trees and carbon stock in Rwanda; these measures have the potential to largely offset national carbon emissions by 2050, according to a carbon-stock analysis based on aerial and satellite images.

Temporarily flooded depressions within croplands are hotspots of nitrous oxide emissions and may account for 30% of total nitrous oxide fluxes from total cultivated area despite representing only 1%, suggest remotely sensed aerial mapping analyses and in situ flux measurements in Zealand, Denmark.

The increase in forest area observed around 2010 in southern China is the result of trees planted after 2000 that formed dense forests about a decade later, according to an analysis of high-resolution Landsat satellite data during 1986–2020.

Land cover change has accelerated in West Africa between 1975 and 2013 as human-dominated land area more than doubled, suggest analyses of Landsat based land cover data sets.

Martin Brandt et al. studied foliage mass from Senegal over 30 years, observing the effects of climate change on dryland vegetation. Rainfall caused increases in both herbaceous and woody foliage, but woody vegetation benefits from rainfall timing changes with potential knock-on effects to the local herbivore populations.