Foliar Moisture Content of NSW Forests and Woodlands (2015-2024)

New South Wales statewide spatial layers of foliar moisture content (FMC) derived from Sentinel-2 satellite data between 2015 and 2024. The dataset includes statistical summaries like the 5th and 95th percentiles, mean, standard deviation, and total values for forest and woodland ecosystems. This work was funded by the NSW Koala Research Plan and is associated with a 2024 PhD thesis from Western Sydney University.

Use Cases

• Modeling wildfire fuel moisture dynamics based on long-term FMC statistical summaries.
• Analyzing forest ecosystem health and drought stress based on foliar moisture content time series.
• Identifying potential climate refugia for koalas based on spatial FMC characterizations.
• Calibrating or validating radiative transfer models using the random forest emulator approach mentioned.

Strengths

• Time series spans 9 years (2015-2024), providing a long-term statistical characterisation.
• Data is derived from Sentinel-2 surface reflectance, a consistent satellite source.
• Includes multiple spatial summary statistics (5th/95th percentiles, mean, standard deviation, total).

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count and dataset size are unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Data may reflect geographic bias inherent to the New South Wales focus.

Provenance

Source

Western Sydney University, Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment.

Collection Method

FMC values estimated from Sentinel-2 surface reflectance data and modelled using a random forest emulator of a radiative transfer model.

Time Range

2015-2024

Freshness

Last updated 2026-05-04 01:51:44.606724; freshness should be verified.

Geography

New South Wales, Australia