The atlas exists as a structural mock-up of what the full programme will look like once all seven papers are finalised. Three papers are published with DOIs; four remain to complete. Until those four land, some of the numbers shown here are illustrative placeholders — values plausible from the broader literature, slotted into the structure that the unpublished papers will eventually populate.
Every value on the map and in the detail panel carries one of three evidence tags:
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Published | Drawn from a paper that is posted as a preprint with a DOI. Citable. Currently applies to the flux site network (Paper 1's empirical base), the moisture corridors and their downstream sinks (Paper 3), and the broader propagation framework (Paper 2). |
| Derived | Computed from published work or visualised in a form the paper itself does not present. The base biome layer falls here — biome classification is standard, but mapping per-biome coefficients onto polygons is a visualisation choice, not a result claim. |
| Placeholder | Illustrative value that lives in the slot a future paper will fill. Specifically: Paper 1 coefficients (α, β), Paper 6 transfer fraction (η), Paper 7 regional forcing, and Paper 8 cascade and full-value figures. Plausible from the broader literature but not yet established by this programme. Will be replaced as each paper is finalised. |
The continuous maps (valuation, cascade risk, cooling intensity, transfer fraction, regional forcing) take their base values from the per-biome metrics. Spatial variation within a biome is anchored to one driver only — corridor proximity from Paper 3:
Other spatial drivers a finished Paper 8 would use — distance to tipping threshold, gridded evapotranspiration from MODIS, downstream economic exposure — are deliberately not modelled here. Adding them would commit the visualisation to methodological choices Paper 8 has not yet made. The transfer fraction (η) layer applies no spatial modulation at all, since Paper 6's published structure gives one value per biome.
Cells outside the official biome polygons take their classification from the nearest classified neighbour ("extrapolated") so the raster covers continents rather than islands; they use the same base value as cells inside the polygon. The point-detail panel flags these cells explicitly.
What follows lists every data layer the visualisation uses and where it came from. Some are real public datasets; some are stylised approximations awaiting better inputs from the programme.
Paper 1. Biome-specific radiative forcing coefficients — derives α and β on 341 flux sites. Posted: doi.org/10.22541/essoar.15001972
Paper 2. Surface-to-TOA transfer framework. Posted: doi.org/10.22541/essoar.15002157
Paper 3. Collapse of moisture corridors. Posted: doi.org/10.22541/essoar.15002167
Paper 6. Empirical constraints on η. Manuscript built; finalisation pending.
Paper 7. The excluded forcing — biophysics at the scale of CO₂. Drafted; consolidation pending.
Paper 8. Cascade valuation. Drafting pending.
Paper 9. Event-scale radiative accounting. Drafting pending.
Forests are not passive carbon stores. They actively manage incoming solar energy — partitioning it into evaporation, heat, and cloud formation — and they pump moisture inland to sustain rainfall hundreds of kilometres from where they grow. The current global ledger for what forests are worth captures only the carbon. The biophysical work — radiative cooling and moisture redistribution — is largely absent from carbon markets, and the IPCC framework itself flags it as low-confidence in magnitude and sign.
This programme quantifies that excluded contribution. It works out, per biome and per hectare, how much radiative cooling forests deliver, what fraction reaches the top of the atmosphere, and what the economic and policy consequences are of having priced that contribution at roughly zero.
The map has eight togglable layers, each tied to a paper in the programme. The biome and flux-site layers form the empirical foundation — these are real. The moisture corridors come from Paper 3 — also real. The cooling intensity, transfer fraction, regional forcing, cascade risk, and valuation layers correspond to papers in various states of completion; their values are placeholders for now.
Click a region to see all metrics for that area in the detail panel. Use the preset views to switch quickly between the foundation, the cooling pathway, the policy argument, and the valuation gap. Refer to the evidence guide whenever you want to know what's been established versus what's still to come.
The programme is based on a series of papers by Shahid, A. B.