Canopy Height Map of Los Angeles County Native Habitat Areas

Using LARIAC4 (2016) LIDAR imagery this Canopy Height Model was derived using the lidR, terra and sf packages in R at a resolution of 1 meter. Native habitat areas were selected based on occurence of native flora taxa from iNaturalist in each LARIAC tile. Tiles with no or very few native plants were not included. Additionally, LA County north of the Santa Clara river and San Gabriel mountains was not included, please contact me if you need additional areas. Non-organic features such as power lines, houses, and some high altitude LIDAR noise are still present in the data, future efforts are needed to remove these. Processing took place on the Occidental College computing cluster using a machine with 192GB RAM and 32 cores and took approximately 3 days. The code used to generate this CHM is available here: https://gist.github.com/max-mapper/d52ad9df2f9ed4d191e67955f950e044. The CHM is available as Cloud Optimized Geotiff, which can be viewed in QGIS dynamically over HTTPS without requiring a full download.