Lorey's Height of Canadian Forests from Lidar and Landsat, 1985-2011

Canada's forested ecosystems, covering approximately 650 million hectares, are represented in this dataset of Lorey's mean height from 1985 to 2011. The data was generated by Natural Resources Canada using a nearest neighbour imputation approach that combines lidar plot information with Landsat pixel-based composites. Products are based on peer-reviewed science and have a spatial resolution of 30 meters.

Use Cases

• Modeling forest biomass and carbon stocks based on the described height and structure metrics.
• Analyzing long-term trends in forest canopy structure based on the 1985-2011 time series.
• Training models for area-based forest inventory attribute prediction based on the lidar and Landsat fusion method.
• Strategic assessment of forest ecosystem changes based on the 30-meter resolution structural estimates.

Strengths

• Covers approximately 650 million hectares of Canada's forested ecosystems.
• Provides a 27-year time series from 1985 to 2011.
• Data is generated from peer-reviewed science and methods described in a cited publication.
• Products have a consistent spatial resolution of 30 meters.

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 data with Landsat pixel-based composites using a nearest neighbour imputation approach with a Random Forests-based distance metric.

Time Range

1985–2011

Freshness

Last updated 2026-03 16:05:10.953751; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Canada's forested ecosystems