The role of GEDI spaceborne lidar in biodiversity analyses: a topical review

Abstract

Biodiversity underpins ecosystem resilience and human well being, yet conventional field inventories alone cannot monitor its rapid change across large areas. Earth observation fills this gap by providing consistent, repeatable measurements for assessing biodiversity change. Lidar is particularly well suited to biodiversity assessment because it captures three dimensional (3D) vegetation structure, which is linked to habitat complexity. The Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) spaceborne lidar mission delivers consistent, globally distributed 3D structure measurements, enabling explicit inference at extents unattainable from aircraft. Here we review 29 studies that use GEDI for biodiversity assessment across ecosystems and taxa. We first map geographic and ecosystem coverage, then synthesize how GEDI data have been used for evaluating aspects of biodiversity. We next assess approaches to link GEDI information and biodiversity variables, and evaluate which aspects of biodiversity have been targeted and their effectiveness. We discuss key limitations and chart future directions, including hypothesis driven data fusion, uncertainty propagation, and cross mission synergies. We find that the use of GEDI for biodiversity applications has increased steadily since 2019, where most work has focused on alpha diversity and species–habitat relationships in forest ecosystems, with a strong emphasis on birds and trees. GEDI structural metrics are commonly fused with complementary predictors from optical, radar, topography, and climate datasets for continuously mapped structure measures, which generally improves model performance relative to GEDI only inputs. By contrast, applications of beta/gamma taxonomic patterns, functional or phylogenetic diversity, non forest systems, and other taxa (e.g. bats, insects, small mammals) remain rare and are represented mainly by isolated case studies. Most analyses are conducted at local to regional scales thus global assessments are still limited. Key methodological gaps include standardized in-situ validation, explicit uncertainty treatment, and temporal analyses beyond single snapshots. Overall, GEDI has become a valuable baseline for biodiversity assessment, yet broader uptake—particularly across ecosystems, taxa, and scales—will benefit from continued multi sensor fusion, improved validation frameworks, and follow on spaceborne lidar missions with greater spatial continuity and accuracy.