Forest Elevation(Ht) Mean 2015

Forest Elevation(Ht) Mean 2015

Mean height of lidar first returns (m). Represents the mean canopy height. Products relating the structure of Canada's forested ecosystems have been generated and made openly accessible. The shared products are based upon peer-reviewed science and relate aspects of forest structure including: (i) metrics calculated directly from the lidar point cloud with heights normalized to heights above the ground surface (e.g., canopy cover, height), and (ii) modelled inventory attributes, derived using an area-based approach generated by using co-located ground plot and ALS data (e.g., volume, biomass). Forest structure estimates were generated by combining information from lidar plots (Wulder et al. 2012) with Landsat pixel-based composites (White et al. 2014; Hermosilla et al. 2016) using a nearest neighbour imputation approach with a Random Forests-based distance metric. These products were generated for strategic-level forest monitoring information needs and are not intended to support operational-level forest management. All products have a spatial resolution of 30 m. For a detailed description of the data, methods applied, and accuracy assessment results see Matasci et al. (2018). When using this data, please cite as follows: Matasci, G., Hermosilla, T., Wulder, M.A., White, J.C., Coops, N.C., Hobart, G.W., Bolton, D.K., Tompalski, P., Bater, C.W., 2018b. Three decades of forest structural dynamics over Canada's forested ecosystems using Landsat time-series and lidar plots. Remote Sensing of Environment 216, 697-714. Matasci et al. 2018) Wulder et al. 2018)

Geographic extent:
Canada's forested ecosystems (~ 650 Mha)
Time period:
1985–2011