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Forest age is crucial for both carbon cycle modelling and effective forest management. Remote sensing provides crucial data for large-scale forest age mapping, but existing products often suffer from low spatial resolutions (typically 1,000 m), making them unsuitable for most forest stands in China, which are generally smaller than this threshold. Recent studies generated static forest age products for 2019 (CAFA V1.0) (Shang et al., 2023a) and 2020 (Cheng et al., 2024) at a 30-m spatial resolution. However, their low temporal resolution limits their applicability for tracking multi-year forest carbon changes. This study aims to generate China's annual forest age dataset (CAFA V2.0) at a 30-m resolution from 1986 to 2022, utilizing forest disturbance monitoring and machine learning techniques. Forest disturbance monitoring, which typically has lower uncertainty compared to machine learning approaches, is primarily employed to update annual forest age. The modified COLD (mCOLD) algorithm, which incorporates spatial information and bidirectional monitoring, was used for forest disturbance monitoring. For undisturbed forests, forest age was estimated using machine learning models trained separately for different regions and forest cover types, with inputs including forest height, vegetation indices, climate, terrain, and soil data. Additionally, adjustments were made for underestimations in the Northeast and Southwest regions identified in CAFA V1.0 using additional reference age samples and region-specific and forest type-specific models. Validation, using a randomly selected 30 % of two reference datasets, indicated that the mapped age of disturbed forest exhibited a small error of ±2.48 years, while the mapped age of undisturbed forest from 1986 to 2022 had a larger error of ±7.91 years. The generated 30 m annual forest age dataset can facilitate forest carbon cycle modelling in China, offering valuable insights for national forest management practices. The CAFA V2.0 dataset is publicly available at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.24464170 (Shang et al., 2023b). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the largest carbon reservoir within terrestrial ecosystems, forest ecosystems play a major role as carbon sinks in the global carbon cycle. There are still some uncertainties regarding the responses of different carbon fluxes to environmental changes in cold temperate climate forest ecosystems. Here, 14 cold temperate forest flux sites for at least ten years were investigated, including carbon fluxes and environmental variables such as temperature, precipitation, shortwave radiation, and vapor pressure deficit. By calculating the Spearman correlation coefficient, there was a congruence between photosynthetic productivity (i.e., gross primary productivity, GPP) and carbon sequestration (i.e., net ecosystem productivity, NEP) at thirteen forest sites, and at one forest site, GPP and NEP were decoupled. Annual GPP and NEP displayed a consistent trend when temperature and precipitation had significantly opposite trends and when temperature had a significantly positive correlation with VPD. But when VPD was significantly negatively correlated with both temperature and SW in spring and when temperature was negatively correlated with both SW and VPD in summer, a decoupling of GPP and NEP occurred. The impacts of various environmental factors on the annual carbon fluxes were calculated for each year and season using the path analysis method. At forest sites with consistent trends in GPP and NEP, annual, spring, and summer temperatures had significant positive correlations with GPP and ecosystem respiration (RE). While at the decoupled forest site, environmental factors had a stronger effect on RE, which then contributed to the observed decoupling of GPP and NEP. Finally, the Partial Least Squares method was used to analyze the relative contribution of each environmental factor to annual carbon fluxes. The results revealed that temperature and summer precipitation were the key environmental factors affecting forest ecosystems. This study provides important insights into the different responses of carbon fluxes in forest ecosystems undergoing environmental changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Satellite-based solar-induced chlorophyll fluorescence (SIF) serves as a valuable proxy for monitoring the photosynthesis of vegetation globally. The Global Ozone Monitoring Experiment-2A (GOME-2A) SIF product has gained widespread popularity, particularly due to its extensive global coverage since 2007. However, serious temporal degradation of the GOME-2A instrument is a problem, and there is currently a lack of time-consistent GOME-2A SIF products that meet the needs of temporal trend analysis. In this paper, the GOME-2A instrument's temporal degradation was first calibrated using a pseudo-invariant method, which revealed 16.21 % degradation of the GOME-2A radiance at the near-infrared (NIR) band from 2007 to 2021. Based on the calibration results, the temporal degradation of the GOME-2A radiance spectra was successfully corrected by using a fitted quadratic polynomial function whose determination coefficient (R2) was 0.851. Next, a data-driven algorithm was applied for SIF retrieval at the 735–758 nm window. Also, a photosynthetically active radiation (PAR)-based upscaling model was employed to upscale the instantaneous clear-sky observations to monthly average values to compensate for the changes in cloud conditions and atmospheric scattering. Accordingly, a global temporally consistent GOME-2A SIF dataset (TCSIF) for 2007 to 2021 with the correction of temporal degradation was successfully generated, and the spatiotemporal pattern of global SIF was then investigated. Corresponding trend maps of the global temporally consistent GOME-2A SIF showed that 62.91 % of vegetated regions underwent an increase in SIF, and the global annual averaged SIF exhibited a trend of increasing by 0.70 % yr -1 during the 2007–2021 period. The TCSIF dataset is available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8242928 (Zou et al., 2023). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies on global carbon emissions from forest loss have been marked by great discrepancies due to uncertainties regarding the lost area and the densities of different carbon pools. In this study, we employed a new global 30 m land cover dynamic dataset (GLC_FCS30D) to improve the assessment of forest loss areas; then, we combined multi-sourced carbon stock products to enhance the information on carbon density. Afterwards, we estimated the global carbon emissions from forest loss over the period of 1985–2020 based on the method recommended by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Guidelines (IPCC). The results indicate that global forest loss continued to accelerate over the past 35 years, totaling about 582.17 Mha and leading to total committed carbon emissions of 35.22 ± 9.38 PgC. Tropical zones dominated global carbon emissions (~2/3) due to their higher carbon density and greater forest loss. Furthermore, global emissions more than doubled in the period of 2015–2020 (1.77 ± 0.44 PgC/yr) compared to those in 1985–2000 (0.69 ± 0.21 PgC/yr). Notably, the forest loss at high altitudes (i.e., above 1000 m) more than tripled in mountainous regions, resulting in more pronounced carbon emissions in these areas. Therefore, the accelerating trend of global carbon emissions from forest loss indicates that great challenges still remain for achieving the COP 26 Declaration to halt forest loss by 2030. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Land cover change information plays an indispensable role in environmental monitoring, climate change research, agricultural planning, urban development, biodiversity conservation, and natural disaster risk assessment. Recently, the free access of Landsat imagery and improvement of computation capacity especially supported by Google Earth Engine platform provides great chance in time-series land-cover change monitoring. We used the stratified land-cover monitoring strategy and time-series Landsat imagery to develop a novel global 30 m land-cover dynamic product with fine classification system from 1985 to 2022 (GLC_FCS30D). Firstly, we used the multitemporal classification to generate the time-series impervious surfaces, wetlands and tidal flat products. Then, we proposed to combine the continuous change detection algorithm and local adaptive updating model to capture the land-cover changes, and to generate a new global 30 m land-cover dynamic product (impervious surfaces, wetlands and tidal flat types were excluded in this step). Next, after overlapping the three multitemporal classification products and the time-series dynamical land-cover dataset, the novel GLC_FCS30D was developed, which contained 35 fine land-cover types. Lastly, using the global 84526 validation points in 2020, the GLC_FCS30D was validated to show the great performance with an overall accuracy of 80.88%, and had obvious advantages over other global land-cover products in diversity of land-cover types and mapping accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, four widely used temporal compositing algorithms, i.e. median, maximum NDVI, medoid, and weighted scoring-based algorithms, were evaluated for annual land cover classification using monthly Landsat time series data. Four study areas located in California, Texas, Kansas, and Minnesota, USA were selected for image compositing and land cover classification. Results indicated that images composited using weighted scoring-based algorithms have the best spatial fidelity compared to other three algorithms. In addition, the weighted scoring-based algorithms have superior classification accuracy, followed by median, maximum NDVI, and medoid in descending order. However, the median algorithm has a significant advantage in computational efficiency which was ∼70 times that of weighted scoring-based algorithms, and with overall classification accuracy just slightly lower (∼0.13% on average) than weighted scoring-based algorithms. Therefore, we recommended the weighted scoring-based compositing algorithms for small area land cover mapping, and median compositing algorithm for the land cover mapping of large area considering the balance between computational complexity and classification accuracy. The findings of this study provide insights into the performance difference between various compositing algorithms, and have potential uses for the selection of pixel-based image compositing technique adopted for land cover mapping based on Landsat time series data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]