The Global Woody Surface: A Planetary Interface for Biodiversity, Ecosystem Function, and Climate

The author declares no conflicts of interest. The data products and analysis workflows supporting the findings of this study are openly available in Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18135119. The source code is maintained at https://github.com/jgewirtzman/lai_wai under the MIT License. Biome classification was based on the WWF Terrestrial Ecoregions of the World dataset originally described by Olson et al. (2001; https://doi.org/10.1641/0006-3568(2001)051[0933:TEOTWA]2.0.CO;2). The specific GIS data files used in this study were obtained from the WWF/Globil-PANDA ArcGIS Open Data portal (https://globil-panda.opendata.arcgis.com) and are archived within the Zenodo repository. Leaf area index data were obtained from the Iio et al. (2014) global woody plant database hosted by ORNL DAAC (https://doi.org/10.3334/ORNLDAAC/1231). Woody area index values were obtained from Gauci et al. (2024); https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07592-w.