Dense Airborne Laser Scanning point clouds from southeastern Finland

11 forest stands scanned in Autumn 2020 with an ALS system known as HeliALS-DW that was mounted on a helicopter. The system incorporated a Riegl VUX-1HA scanner (1550 nm) (Riegl GmbH, Austria), Riegl miniVUX-1UAV scanner (905 nm), and a positioning system consisting of a LITEF UIMU-LCI inertial measurement unit (IMU), a NovAtel Flexpak6 GNSS receiver and GGG-703 antenna. The flight trajectories consisted of a 2-D rectangular grid with flight lines separated by 50 m. The flight speed was 9.5 m/s and the flight altitude approximately 80 m above the ground.

The point density of the final VUX-1HA point cloud ranges from 800 pts/m2 to 6000 pts/m2 and from 100 pts/m2 to 600 pts/m2 in the miniVUX-1UAV point cloud, depending on stand density and structure.

Point clouds have been localized to a local coordinate system (true geographical location obfuscated), and are provided in LAZ format. No classification or normalization. DataTable.txt provided for stand-wise forest information.

Research data used in Pyörälä et al. (2026) "From between-stand to within-tree variation: wood and timber quality of Norway spruce (Picea abies H. Karst) analyzed at scale using laser scanning and industrial data". Published in Annals of Forest Science.

Handheld laser scanner (HHLS) data from 13 stands (10 of which are the same as here; on one stand the HHLS failed) is included in another dataset: https://doi.org/10.23729/fd-0a21c7cc-1df5-302d-927e-eacf72857f07
The data are roughly aligned on top of each other, but not precisely co-registered.