EcoDes-DK15: High-resolution ecological descriptors of vegetation and terrain derived from Denmark's national airborne laser scanning data set

Eighteen high-resolution ecological descriptors of vegetation and terrain for Denmark "EcoDes-DK15"

The data are derived from the nationwide airborne laser scanning / LiDAR campaign of Denmark from 2014-2015 provided by the Danish Agency for Data Supply and Efficiency.

Update: EcoDes-DK15 v1.1.0 (4 Dec. 2021)

Following the recommendations and feedback during the first round of peer-review, we updated the EcoDes-DK processing pipeline and EcoDes-DK15 data set. The key changes are:

• New version of the source data optimised to contain only point data collected before the end of 2015. The source data for EcoDes-DK15 v1.0.0 unintentionally contained data from 2018. The new source data is documented here.
• New "date_stamp_*" auxiliary variables that illustrate the survey dates for the vegetation points in each cell. See updated descriptor documentation here.
• Re-scaling of "solar_radiation" variable to MJ per 100 m² per year.

Detailed documentation for the data set can be found in the accompanying manuscript and GitHub repository:

Assmann, J. J., Moeslund, J. E., Treier, U. A., and Normand, S.: EcoDes-DK15: High-resolution ecological descriptors of vegetation and terrain derived from Denmark's national airborne laser scanning data set, Earth Syst. Sci. Data Discuss. [preprint], https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-2021-222, in review, 2021.

https://github.com/jakobjassmann/ecodes-dk-lidar

Files are compressed using bzip2 and tar archiving. The compressed archives can be extracted using commonly available archiving tools (for example 7z on Windows, the archiving tool on macOS and bz2 on Linux).  

A small example "teaser" subset (5 MB) of the data set, covering the Husby Klit area from Figure 7 in the manuscript, can be found here.

Abstract (from manuscript)

Biodiversity studies could strongly benefit from three-dimensional data on ecosystem structure derived from contemporary remote sensing technologies, such as Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR). Despite the increasing availability of such data at regional and national scales, the average ecologist has been limited in accessing them due to high requirements on computing power and remote-sensing knowledge. We processed Denmark’s publicly available national Airborne Laser Scanning (ALS) data set acquired in 2014/15 together with the accompanying elevation model to compute 70 rasterized descriptors of interest for ecological studies. With a grain size of 10 m, these data products provide a snapshot of high-resolution measures including vegetation height, structure and density, as well as topographic descriptors including elevation, aspect, slope and wetness across more than forty thousand square kilometres covering almost all of Denmark’s terrestrial surface. The resulting data set is comparatively small (~94 GB, compressed 16.8 GB) and the raster data can be readily integrated into analytical workflows in software familiar to many ecologists (GIS software, R, Python). Source code and documentation for the processing workflow are openly available via a code repository, allowing for transfer to other ALS data sets, as well as modification or re-calculation of future instances of Denmark’s national ALS data set. We hope that our high-resolution ecological vegetation and terrain descriptors (EcoDes-DK15) will serve as an inspiration for the publication of further such data sets covering other countries and regions and that our rasterized data set will provide a baseline of the ecosystem structure for current and future studies of biodiversity, within Denmark and beyond.

Acknowledgements (from manuscript)

We would like to thank Andràs Zlinszky for his contributions to earlier versions of the data set, Charles Davison for feedback regarding data use and handling, as well as Matthew Barbee and Zsófia Koma for sharing their insights on the source data merger and Zsófia’s script to generate summary statistics for the different versions of the DHM point clouds. Funding for this work was provided by the Carlsberg Foundation (Distinguished Associate Professor Fellowships) and Aarhus University Research Foundation (AUFF-E-2015-FLS-8-73) to Signe Normand (SN). This work is a contribution to SustainScapes – Center for Sustainable Landscapes under Global Change (grant NNF20OC0059595 to SN).