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Full catalog/ABoVE_LVIS_VegetationStructure_1923
ABoVE_LVIS_VegetationStructure_1923·v1·dataset

Forest height and structure across North America from lidar (2017, 2019)

ABoVE: LVIS L3 Gridded Vegetation Structure across North America, 2017 and 2019
biosphere NASA ORNL_CLOUD Level 3 multiple
In plain English

What it measures. Detailed maps of forest and vegetation structure across North America, including canopy height, how much ground the canopy covers, the complexity of the vegetation, and the ground elevation, at 30-m resolution.

How it's made. Built from laser (lidar) measurements taken by NASA's LVIS instrument flown on aircraft in 2017 and 2019, with the laser pulses processed into gridded canopy metrics.

How & where you'd use it. Used to study the structure of Arctic, boreal, temperate, and subtropical forests, supporting NASA's ABoVE and GEDI vegetation science.

What's measured

BIOSPHERE › ECOSYSTEMS › TERRESTRIAL ECOSYSTEMS › FORESTSBIOSPHERE › VEGETATION › CANOPY CHARACTERISTICSLAND SURFACE › TOPOGRAPHY › TERRAIN ELEVATION

Coverage & cadence

  • Time span2017-06-29 → 2019-08-08
  • Measured byG-V (LVIS)
  • Processing levelLevel 3
  • Spatial extent-167.324, 7.126, -28.8244, 78.1366
  • Formatsmultiple
  • StatusCOMPLETE

What you can do with it

  • Map vegetation, forests and biomass
  • Monitor ecosystem productivity and carbon
  • Support habitat and biodiversity studies
Official description

This dataset provides Level 3 (L3) footprint-level gridded metrics and attributes collected from NASA's Land, Vegetation, and Ice Sensor (LVIS)-Facility instrument for each flightline from 2017 and 2019. In 2017, the LVIS-Facility instrument was flown at a nominal flight altitude of 28,000 ft onboard a Dynamic Aviation Super King Air B200T. In 2019, the LVIS-Facility and LVIS-Classic instruments were flown at a nominal flight altitude of 41,000 feet onboard the NASA Gulfstream V. LVIS data are collected as waveforms over footprints of ~10-m diameter. The L3 data include grids of canopy relative height (RH), complexity, canopy cover (CC), ground elevation, and the number of LVIS footprints available to produce a pixel's estimate.. These 30-m resolution grids describe the vertical column of the vegetation canopy in detail with relative canopy height metrics and are enriched with an additional set of canopy cover estimates at a variety of height thresholds. The LVIS-Facility instrument 2017 and 2019 acquisitions span Arctic, boreal, temperate, and sub-tropical landscapes in support of a variety of Arctic-Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE)- and Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI)-related science. In the ABoVE study domain of arctic and boreal Alaska and Western Canada, some of these acquisitions coincide spatially with legacy small-footprint airborne lidar. Data are included for the ABoVE domain and also for the continental U.S. and central America in support of GEDI calibration and validation. Data files are provided in GeoTIFF format and one geopackage file shows flightlines.

Get the data

above_lvis_vegetationstructure_1923_access.py
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc")          # free Earthdata Login

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="ABoVE_LVIS_VegetationStructure_1923",
    version="1",
    bounding_box=(-122.5, 37.2, -121.8, 37.9),  # your area (W,S,E,N)
    temporal=("2024-01-01", "2024-12-31"),       # your dates
)
files = earthaccess.open(results)   # stream straight from ORNL_CLOUD
Browsing CMR needs no login. Downloading or streaming bytes needs a free Earthdata Login + the earthaccess package.