terrabits

Terrabits is a unit of measurement used in environmental science to quantify the amount of digital information required to represent terrestrial ecosystems. One terrabit equals one trillion (10^12) bits of data, and the unit is designed to provide a standardized scale for comparing the complexity and spatial resolution of ecological datasets. The concept was first introduced by the Earth Data Institute in 2015 in a paper that discussed the growing volume of remote sensing and biodiversity information. The authors argued that an explicit metric would aid researchers, policymakers, and data custodians in assessing storage needs and data compression strategies across projects such as global vegetation mapping, wildlife distribution modeling, and land‑use change analysis.

In practice, terrabits are applied when addressing the storage and bandwidth requirements of large‑scale Earth observation missions. For example, a high‑resolution Sentinel‑2 image covering the entire Amazon basin may be compressed to 1.5 terrabits, whereas a lower‑resolution Climate Model output for the same region might only require 0.5 terrabits. By expressing dataset sizes in terrabits, scientists can more readily negotiate data sharing agreements and design infrastructure within national and international data repositories. The metric has also been incorporated into the metadata standards for the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, where several datasets now report their sizes in terrabits to enhance interoperability.

Although the concept is still relatively new, terrabits have already been cited in a number of peer‑reviewed studies and are expected to become a common reference point as the volume and variety of terrestrial ecological data continue to expand.