Gabon Forest Canopy Structure Metrics from LVIS Airborne Lidar

Five forested sites in Gabon were surveyed in February and March 2016 using NASA's Land, Vegetation, and Ice Sensor (LVIS). The dataset provides footprint-level canopy structure products, including vertical profiles of canopy cover fraction and plant area index in 1-meter bins, as well as summary metrics for each 20-meter waveform. These data were collected by NASA as part of the AfriSAR project, a collaboration with ESA, DLR, and AGEOS, to support the calibration of spaceborne missions studying forest carbon cycles.

Use Cases

• Calibrating and validating spaceborne lidar and radar missions by comparing airborne-derived canopy cover fraction and leaf area index.
• Modeling vertical forest structure and biomass distribution using 1-meter binned profiles of plant area index and canopy cover.
• Analyzing spatial variability in canopy characteristics across five distinct forest sites in Gabon using footprint-level summary data.
• Studying the relationship between total recorded energy from lidar waveforms and derived structural metrics like leaf area index.

Strengths

• Provides three distinct, detailed canopy structure information types per flight: vertical profiles in 1m bins and footprint summaries in 10m bins.
• Data collection was part of a major international collaboration (AfriSAR) involving NASA, ESA, DLR, and AGEOS.
• Covers five specific forested sites, offering spatial context for analysis.

Limitations

• Exact row count, dataset size, and specific column names are not provided by any source.
• Conflicting last updated dates: one source states 2016-03-08, while others state 2026-03 - this suggests potential metadata errors.
• License is inconsistently reported as 'other-license-specified' or 'None', requiring user verification.

Provenance

Source

NASA, collected as part of the AfriSAR project.

Collection Method

Airborne data collected using the Land, Vegetation, and Ice Sensor (LVIS) lidar instrument.

Time Range

February - March 2016.

Freshness

2026-03-13 18:50:02.320997

Geography

Five forested sites in Gabon.