From lidar waveforms to vegetation products: 7380 km2 of high-resolution airborne and simulated GEDI data over Sierra Nevada, California

Vegetated ecosystems have complex three-dimensional (3D) canopy structures with diverse plant type assemblages, crown architectures and historical disturbances. Vegetation structure changes dramatically with strong topographic, edaphic and climate gradients. Airborne lidar remote sensing has the potential to measure fine-scale 3D proprieties of forests with limited temporal and spatial coverage limitations due to prohibitively cost. Here, we present a composite high-resolution airborne lidar dataset covering 7380 km2 over the Sierra Nevada, California, that has been calculated from a time-series (2014-2017) collected by the NASA-JPL Airborne Snow Observatory (ASO).

We coherently merge low resolution (~1 pt m-2) ASO lidar measurements, primarily acquired to quantify snow volume and dynamics, to produce high-resolution point clouds that better describe forest structure and underlying topography (Ferraz et al., 2016). The methodology addresses the removal of lidar points corresponding ...