Field observations for "A carbon monitoring system for mapping regional, annual aboveground biomass across the northwestern USA"

These data represent a portion of the forest inventory data used in Hudak et al. (2020) "A carbon monitoring system for mapping regional, annual aboveground biomass across the northwestern USA". This study used forest inventory data located in lidar units along with Landsat data, topographic metrics, and climate metrics to create maps of forested biomass across the northwestern USA (Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and western Montana.) The data requirements for inclusion in this study included: 1. fixed-area plots, 2. plots centers were recorded using a global navigation satellite system receiver (e.g., a GPS receiver) capable of differential correction, and 3. plots were located in a lidar unit where tree data were collected within 3 years of the lidar collection. A shapefile of the lidar units can be found in Fekety and Hudak (2020, https://doi.org/10.3334/ORNLDAAC/1766). The forest inventory data presented here (n = 2,680 plots) include all data that could be made publicly available and have been compiled from numerous existing datasets. The forest inventory data were collected using project-specific sampling plans and therefore these data have been formatted to be read by the Forest Vegetation Simulator (FVS; https://www.fs.usda.gov/fvs/). The forest inventory data in this dataset were collected between 2002 and 2017 and located in Idaho, Oregon, and Washington, USA.These data were used in combination with lidar, topographic, and climate datasets to create annual aboveground biomass maps across the northwestern United States for the years 2000-2016.These data were published on 04/29/2020. Minor metadata updates were made On 04/18/2024.