139,488 canopy gaps were mapped in 2012, declining to 121,986 by 2022, while total gap area increased from 604 to 652 hectares. This dataset, created by Janice Owusu and hosted on Borealis Harvested Dataverse, quantifies gap formation, expansion, persistence, and closure over a decade using airborne laser scanning. It provides a baseline for understanding fine-scale structural change and disturbance regimes in a 10,000-hectare temperate mixedwood forest in Ontario, Canada.
Use Cases
- Model forest disturbance regimes based on power-law scaling of gap-size distributions.
- Assess long-term forest structural change based on decadal gap dynamics.
- Calibrate remote sensing algorithms for fine-scale canopy gap detection.
- Study the ecological impact of large canopy gaps based on their disproportionate area contribution.
Strengths
- Decadal time series covering three intervals (2012, 2018, 2022).
- Landscape-scale coverage of a 10,000-hectare research forest.
- Quantifies four specific gap dynamics categories: formation, expansion, persistence, and closure.
- Includes specific gap count and area statistics for each survey year.
Limitations
- Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
- Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
- Data may reflect geographic bias inherent to a single research forest in Ontario.
Provenance
- Source
- Borealis Harvested Dataverse
- Collection Method
- Airborne laser scanning surveys processed with a fixed 3-metre height threshold on normalized 1-metre canopy height models.
- Time Range
- 2012 to 2022
- Freshness
- Last updated 2026-05-02 04:10:35; freshness should be verified.
- Geography
- Petawawa Research Forest, Ontario, Canada