Canopy size, gap size, plant height, and scaled height in NEAT plots at Jornada Basin LTER, Summer 2017

This data package contains estimates of vegetation indicators
derived from UAV overflights and comparable field observatons at the
NEAT experiment in the Jornada Basin of southern New Mexico, USA.
The purpose of this study is to develop a UAV-based remote sensing
method that can estimate vegetation indicators in arid and semiarid
rangelands. This method was used to characterize six rangeland
indicators (canopy size, bare soil gap size, plant height, scaled
height, vegetation cover, and bare soil cover) in a semiarid
grass-shrub ecosystem at the NEAT site. The drone-based estimates
were validated with field measurements by using the standard
transect methods (gap intercept, drop disk, and line-point intercept
methods) in the spring and summer of 2017. Further, we use these
results to show possible applications of drone-based products on
arid and semiarid rangelands: the spatially explicit input of an
ecological model, to detect and characterize non-stationarity, and
to detect landscape anisotropy.