# Canopy height screening

Last updated: 2026-10-18

> Measure canopy height across a property from Meta and WRI’s global canopy height map at about 1.2 m, group it into low, intermediate and tall canopy, and outline low-canopy areas for a field visit.

How tall is the vegetation on this land, and where is there almost none? Height separates grass and scrub from young trees and forest more directly than tree cover alone. The analysis reads Meta and WRI’s canopy height map at its native resolution and groups the property into low (under 1 m), intermediate (1 to 3 m) and tall canopy (3 m and up).

## Who it is for

- **Carbon project developers.** Check land against the height part of a forest definition, find open land for ARR, and describe the starting vegetation for a baseline.
- **Field and planting teams.** Take outlines of low-canopy areas, filtered to practical sizes, into visit and plot planning.
- **Restoration organizations and funders.** See a site’s vegetation structure in metres, not only as tree cover percentages.

## What goes in

A property boundary as a polygon, and these settings:

| Setting | Default | Range |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Valid heights below this boundary are classified as low canopy. | 1 | 0–96 |
| Valid heights at or above this boundary are classified as tall canopy. | 3 | 0–96 |
| Minimum contiguous candidate field-work area in hectares. | 0.1 | 0.01 or more |
| Minimum practical candidate width in meters. | 10 | 1 or more |
| Largest enclosed hole to fill in a candidate area, in square meters. | 100 | 0 or more |

## Data sources

- [Meta and WRI Global Canopy Height Map v2 (CHMv2)](https://registry.opendata.aws/dataforgood-fb-forestsv2/), by Meta, World Resources Institute. Spatial resolution: About 1.2 m. Temporal resolution: One snapshot, from imagery captured 2017–2020 (about 80% of it 2018–2020). Coverage: Global. License: [CC BY 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Read at its native resolution, without resampling. Cite: [Brandt et al. 2026, arXiv](https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.06382).

## What you get

- Area and share of the property’s observed area in each height group, and the mean height.
- Area in height bands from 0 m to over 40 m.
- Outlines of low-canopy areas worth a visit.
- How much of the property the map covers.

### Map layers

- **Canopy height.** Estimated tree height in metres from Meta/WRI CHMv2, about 1.2 m pixels. Imagery is from 2017–2020, so newer clearing or growth won’t show.
- **Canopy height screening.** Canopy grouped by height: low (under 1 m), intermediate (1–3 m) and tall (3 m and up).
- **Field-review candidates.** Low-canopy areas worth a field visit. Patches under 0.1 ha and strips under 10 m wide are dropped, and small holes inside are filled.

## Limits

- The imagery is from 2017 to 2020. Clearing or growth since then will not show.
- It is one snapshot, not a time series, so it cannot show change.
- Heights are estimated from satellite imagery by a model trained on airborne lidar, not measured on your site. Shadows, image quality and vegetation structure cause local errors.
- The 1 m and 3 m boundaries are screening defaults. Set them to your forest definition before each run.

## Where it fits

Run it at pre-feasibility to see where open land sits, and again at baseline to describe the vegetation a project starts from. Plots and field measurements remain the evidence; the analysis tells you where to put them.

## Related data layers

- Meta/WRI Global Canopy Height v2: Estimated top-of-canopy height from 2017–2020 imagery at about 1.2 m resolution for canopy structure and forest screening.
- Tree Cover Loss (10 Years): Landsat-derived pixels where tree-cover loss was detected, summarized over the configured ten-year window to show recent forest disturbance.
- Nature Trace Forest Typology 2020: Global 10 m 2020 forest typology shown as the most likely class: primary, naturally regenerating, planted, plantation, tree crops and agroforestry, or other land.

## Tools and guides

- [VM0047 field data: what an ARR project records](https://restorationscope.com/blog/vm0047-arr-field-data)
- [What is dMRV?](https://restorationscope.com/blog/what-is-dmrv)
- [How to track tree planting and survival across many sites](https://restorationscope.com/blog/track-tree-planting-survival)

## Questions teams ask

### Does canopy height tell me whether land counts as forest?

Not on its own. It screens the height trees reach today. Forest definitions under the UN climate rules combine a minimum crown cover (10% to 30%), a minimum height trees can reach at maturity (2 to 5 m) and a minimum area (0.05 to 1 ha), and young stands can count. Set the tall-canopy boundary to your country’s height and read the result beside tree cover and the land’s history.

### Why are recent changes missing?

The map is built from imagery taken between 2017 and 2020. For change since then, use forest cover loss, degraded land mapping on newer imagery, or a field visit.

### How is this different from the canopy height layer on the map?

The map layer shows the same data for looking. The analysis measures it inside your boundary, groups it with your thresholds and saves the outlines on the property, so you can compare properties and take the outlines to the field.

### What do I need to run it?

A property boundary as a polygon, drawn on the map or imported from a KML, shapefile or GeoJSON file. The result is saved on the property, beside its other records and maps.

More: [All analyses](https://restorationscope.com/analyses). Book a call: https://cal.com/bernat/restoration-scope-initial-call