Multi-temporal high-resolution data products of ecosystem structure derived from country-wide airborne laser scanning surveys of the Netherlands

This data repository contains a set of multi-temporal data products of ecosystem structure derived from four national ALS surveys of the Netherlands (AHN1–AHN4) (folder: 1. Data_products). Four sets of 25 LiDAR-derived vegetation metrics representing ecosystem height, cover, and structural variability are provided at 10 m spatial resolution, providing valuable data sources for a wide range of ecological research and field beyond. All 25 LiDAR metrics were calculated using Laserfarm workflow (https://laserfarm.readthedocs.io/en/latest/) (building on the user-extendable features from the “Laserchicken” software: https://laserchicken.readthedocs.io/en/latest/#features). All metrics are calculated with the normalized point cloud. More details on metric calculation are provided on GitHub (Laserchicken: https://github.com/eEcoLiDAR/laserchicken and Laserfarm: https://github.com/eEcoLiDAR/Laserfarm), as well as on the “Laserchicken” documentation page (https://laserchicken.readthedocs.io/en/latest/). We also provided masks to minimize the influence of water surfaces, buildings and roads, as well as powerlines in the data products (folder: 2. Masks). Since the point density of each AHN dataset has changed significantly which may have influence on generated LiDAR metrics, we also provided the four raster layers of point density (all points) for each AHN dataset (folder: 3. Point_density). Two use cases demonstrated the utility of the presented data products: (use case 1) monitoring forest structural change across time using multi-temporal ALS data and (use case 2) comparison of vegetation structural difference within Natura 2000 sites. The used data are also provided (folder: 4. Use_case). Note that all the raster layers and shapefiles provided in this repository are under the local Dutch coordinate system “RD_new” (EPSG: 28992, NAP:5709).