Country-wide data products of ecosystem structure from the fifth and sixth (2025 coverage) airborne laser scanning surveys of the Netherlands (AHN5-AHN6)

This data repository contains country-wide data products for the ecosystem structure metrics generated from the fifth and sixth (2025 coverage) Airborne Laser Scanning (ALS) data across the Netherlands (AHN5-AHN6). Twenty-five ecosystem structure metrics (at 10-meter resolution, GeoTIFF format) were derived from the currently available AHN5 and AHN6 datasets (https://www.ahn.nl/dataroom) (updated on 31-08-2026) using the Laserfarm workflow (https://zenodo.org/record/5636773). Laserfarm is a free and open-source workflow that enables efficient, scalable, and distributed processing of multi-terabyte LiDAR point clouds from national and regional ALS surveys into LiDAR metrics of ecosystem structure. All code of Laserfarm is hosted and freely available on GitHub (https://github.com/eEcoLiDAR/Laserfarm). The Jupyter Notebooks for the processing of the AHN5 dataset are available on GitHub (https://github.com/ShiYifang/AHN5).

The twenty-five LiDAR metrics are related to three key dimensions of ecosystem structure (ecosystem height, ecosystem cover, and ecosystem structural complexity). Each GeoTIFF layer represents one LiDAR metric at 10 m resolution covering the whole Netherlands (file name as "ahn5_10m_feature_name.tif"). 

Note that the provided data layers are the combination of AHN5 and current available part of AHN6 (2025 coverage), and there are some areas in the north part of the Netherlands are not covered (NA value in the GeoTIFF layers). Due to different scanning strategies and flight lines between AHN5 and AHN6, the point densities are not evenly distributed across the country, resulting in stripe effect on some layers (e.g. height or cover metrics that capturing vegetation below 1 m).

An overview of all the listed metrics (maps) is also provided in the PDF version (AHN5_25metrics.pdf).

A map of currently available AHN5 and AHN6 flightlines and a detailed description of all the metrics can be found in the README file (README.docx).

For previous AHN data products, please visit:

Data repository of multi-temporal high-resolution data products of ecosystem structure derived from country-wide airborne laser scanning surveys of the Netherlands: https://zenodo.org/records/18499735.

For more detailed description of the data products and processing pipeline, please visit:

Shi, Y., Wang, J., & Kissling, W. D. (2025). Multi-temporal high-resolution data products of ecosystem structure derived from country-wide airborne laser scanning surveys of the Netherlands. Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 17(7), 3641-3677. https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-17-3641-2025.