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.