WDTS Project: Foliar Trait Maps from AVIRIS-C Imagery, Western U.S. 2013-2018

From 2013 to 2018, NASA's Western Diversity Time Series project collected airborne AVIRIS-Classic imagery over California and Nevada. The dataset holds maps of 14 foliar functional traits, including nitrogen, lignin, and chlorophyll, derived from surface reflectance products using partial least squares regression models. These data are provided in cloud-optimized GeoTIFF and ENVI formats to enable multi-temporal analyses of plant traits and biodiversity at the ecoregion scale.

Use Cases

• Modeling plant biodiversity and ecosystem function based on mapped foliar trait concentrations.
• Analyzing temporal changes in vegetation chemistry based on multi-year airborne imagery.
• Studying the spatial distribution of plant functional traits like nitrogen and lignin across western U.S. ecoregions.
• Calibrating or validating satellite-derived vegetation products based on high-resolution spectral data.

Strengths

• Contains 14 distinct foliar trait maps derived from calibrated spectral data.
• Imagery was collected over multiple years (2013-2018) with several acquisitions per year, supporting time-series analysis.
• Data underwent topographic, BRDF, and glint corrections and was georectified to 15-meter spatial resolution.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count and total dataset size are unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Data may reflect geographic bias inherent to its collection over California and Nevada.

Provenance

Source

NASA Western Diversity Time Series (WDTS) Project, via AWS Open Data.

Collection Method

Airborne imagery from the AVIRIS-Classic instrument on the NASA ER-2, processed to surface reflectance and trait maps via regression models.

Time Range

2013-04-10 to 2018-08-16

Freshness

Last update date is unknown; freshness unverified.

Geography

Western United States, specifically California and Nevada.