Woodland Structure in England: LiDAR-Derived Canopy Metrics for 2020

Three raster maps of English woodland structure derived from the National LiDAR Programme (2017-2024). The data includes canopy height, gap fraction, and foliage height diversity at 30-meter resolution for the National Forestry Inventory 2020. Forestry Commission and Environment Agency produced this dataset, with a last update timestamp of 2026-07-10.

Use Cases

• Modeling forest carbon stocks based on canopy height metrics.
• Assessing woodland habitat quality and fragmentation based on canopy gap fraction.
• Monitoring biodiversity indicators based on foliage height diversity calculated using Shannon's Diversity Index across six height layers.

Strengths

• Data is derived from the national-scale Environment Agency LiDAR Programme spanning 2017 to 2024.
• Includes three distinct, scientifically defined structural metrics: Canopy Height 90th percentile, Canopy Gap Fraction, and Foliage Height Diversity.
• Provides companion catalogue files detailing the 5km tile composition and acquisition years of the underlying LiDAR surveys.

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.

Provenance

Source

Forestry Commission & Environment Agency

Collection Method

Remote sensing data from the National LiDAR Programme processed to generate raster maps.

Time Range

Underlying LiDAR data from 2017-2024, mapped to the National Forestry Inventory 2020.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-07-10 08:36:07.069713; freshness should be verified.

Geography

England