EcoDes-DK15: 70 High-Resolution Ecological Descriptors for Denmark

Denmark's national airborne laser scanning data from 2014-2015 was processed to create 70 rasterized ecological descriptors. The dataset provides a snapshot of vegetation height, structure, density, and topography at a 10-meter grain size. It was created by researchers from Aarhus University and updated in December 2021.

Use Cases

• Modeling biodiversity patterns based on high-resolution vegetation structure descriptors.
• Analyzing terrain and topographic features derived from nationwide LiDAR data.
• Studying vegetation density and height for habitat suitability assessments.
• Investigating solar radiation patterns across the Danish landscape.

Strengths

• Contains 70 distinct ecological descriptors derived from a national-scale data source.
• Data has a high spatial resolution with a 10-meter grain size.
• Source data is specifically optimized to contain only point data collected before the end of 2015.

Limitations

• Description metadata is limited; actual data quality requires manual inspection after download.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• This is a 5MB teaser version covering only the Husby Klit area, not the full national dataset.

Provenance

Source

Danish Agency for Data Supply and Efficiency's nationwide airborne laser scanning/LiDAR campaign.

Collection Method

Processed from raw LiDAR and elevation model data to compute rasterized descriptors.

Time Range

2014-2015

Freshness

Last updated on 4 December 2021.

Geography

Denmark (teaser subset covers the Husby Klit area).