Forest 95th Percentile Elevation Across Canada's Forested Ecosystems (2015)

2015 data representing the 95th percentile of first returns height in meters for Canada's forested ecosystems. The dataset was generated by Natural Resources Canada within the National Terrestrial Ecosystem Monitoring System framework, combining lidar plot information with Landsat pixel-based composites using a nearest neighbour imputation approach. It provides strategic-level forest monitoring information with a spatial resolution of 30 meters.

Use Cases

• Modeling forest canopy structure based on the 95th percentile height metric derived from lidar.
• Analyzing changes in forest height distribution across Canada's ~650 Mha forested ecosystems.
• Supporting strategic-level forest monitoring and ecosystem assessment based on peer-reviewed science and Landsat composites.
• Integrating lidar-derived forest structure metrics with other geospatial data for large-scale ecological studies.

Strengths

• Covers a vast geographic extent of approximately 650 million hectares of Canada's forested ecosystems.
• Based on peer-reviewed science and methods described in a cited publication (Matasci et al., 2018).
• Provides a consistent spatial resolution of 30 meters for all products.
• Generated within the framework of Canada's National Terrestrial Ecosystem Monitoring System (NTEMS).

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.
• The data is intended for strategic-level monitoring and not for operational-level forest management, as stated in the description.

Provenance

Source

Natural Resources Canada

Collection Method

Generated by combining lidar plot information with Landsat pixel-based composites using a nearest neighbour imputation approach with a Random Forests-based distance metric.

Time Range

2015

Freshness

Last updated 2026-03-16 16:04:32.479581; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Canada's forested ecosystems