NASA G-LiHT: Airborne LiDAR, Hyperspectral, and Thermal Ecosystem Maps

NASA's G-LiHT project is a portable airborne imaging system that simultaneously maps the composition, structure, and function of terrestrial ecosystems. The data includes orthorectified aerial photography, LiDAR-derived canopy height models, and digital surface models, collected primarily over forest communities in North America since 2011. Data products are provided as high-resolution GeoTIFFs and KML files via AWS Open Data.

Use Cases

• Modeling forest canopy structure and variability based on LiDAR-derived height data.
• Analyzing ecosystem composition and function using simultaneous hyperspectral and thermal imagery.
• Creating high-resolution orthomosaics for local area land cover studies.
• Studying elevation and terrain features from digital surface model rasters.

Strengths

• Provides data from three simultaneous sensor types: LiDAR, hyperspectral, and thermal.
• Offers very high spatial resolution, with orthomosaics at 1 inch and other products at 1 meter.
• Covers a broad diversity of forest communities and ecoregions across North America.
• Data collection is ongoing, with campaigns starting in 2011.

Limitations

• Orthomosaics are automatically generated, and the description notes results may not be optimal.
• Row count and total dataset size are unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.

Provenance

Source

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

Collection Method

Collected via portable airborne imaging system on aerial campaigns.

Time Range

Data collection began in 2011 and is ongoing.

Freshness

Collection is described as ongoing, but the last update date is unknown.

Geography

Conterminous United States, Alaska, Puerto Rico, and Mexico.