Forests contribute to climate change mitigation through carbon storage and uptake, but the extent to which this carbon pool varies in space and time is still poorly known. Several Earth Observation missions have been specifically designed to address this issue, for example, NASA's GEDI, NASA‐ISRO's NISAR and ESA's BIOMASS. Yet, all these missions' products require independent and consistent validation. A permanent, global, in...

Droughts in a warming climate have become more common and more extreme, making understanding forest responses to water stress increasingly pressing. Analysis of water stress in trees has long focused on water potential in xylem and leaves, which influences stomatal closure and water flow through the soil‐plant‐atmosphere continuum. At the same time, changes of vegetation water content (VWC) are linked to a range of tree respon...

Aim Large tropical trees form the interface between ground and airborne observations, offering a unique opportunity to capture forest properties remotely and to investigate their variations on broad scales. However, despite rapid development of metrics to characterize the forest canopy from remotely sensed data, a gap remains between aerial and field inventories. To close this gap, we propose a new pan‐tropical model to predic...

Aim Forest height, an important biophysical property, underlies the distribution of carbon stocks across scales. Because in situ observations are labour intensive and thus impractical for large‐scale mapping and monitoring of forest heights, most previous studies adopted statistical approaches to help alleviate measured data discontinuity in space and time. Here, we document an improved modelling approach which links metabolic...

The amount and spatial distribution of forest biomass in the Amazon basin is a major source of uncertainty in estimating the flux of carbon released from land‐cover and land‐use change. Direct measurements of aboveground live biomass (AGLB) are limited to small areas of forest inventory plots and site‐specific allometric equations that cannot be readily generalized for the entire basin. Furthermore, there is no spaceborne remo...

The Atlantic rainforest of southern Bahia is one of the last remnants of the lowland forest of eastern Brazil that once covered the entire coastal area from Rio Grande do Norte to Rio Grande do Sul ( lat 8°–28° S) and has been deforested to a small fraction of its original cover (1–12%). All recent vegetation surveys have been based on optical satellite data, which is hampered by cloud cover and by southern Bahia's intricate m...