Modeling with LiDAR and Hyperspectral Data

This goal of this project was to assess the utility of airborne data collected as part of NASA’s ABoVE airborne campaign (AVIRIS-NG hyperspectral and LVIS waveform LiDAR data) for estimating percent cover of black spruce forest. While this workflow could be expanded over a larger area, this small project was focused on an area near Fairbanks, Alaska, where NEON field measurements of tree inventory are available across a gradient of environmental conditions. The NEON field data was manipulated and used as the “ground-truth” values for the proportional cover of black spruce. AVIRIS-NG spectral bands and LVIS relative height metrics were used as predictors in a simple model. The main bottleneck in this project was loading and intersecting these large geospatial datasets to produce a training dataset containing plot-level values for all datasets.

In order to continue this analysis, more sites should be incorporated across a larger area. Hundreds of sites with AVIRIS, LVIS, and ground-truth would be required to train a model for a real mapping effort. Because this didn’t seem feasible with field sites that I currently have access to, this project was discontinued and I shifted to a similar project using Landsat and GEDI instead.

• Code Repository link

Dataset References:

NEON Vegetation Structure Data: National Ecological Observatory Network. 2020. Data Product DP1.10098.001, Woody plant vegetation structure. Provisional data downloaded from on November 15, 2020. Battelle, Boulder, CO, USA NEON. 2020.

LVIS LiDAR Data: Blair, J. B. and M. Hofton 2020. LVIS Facility L2 Geolocated Surface Elevation and Canopy Height Product, Version 1 . [Indicate subset used]. Boulder, Colorado USA. NASA National Snow and Ice Data Center Distributed Active Archive Center. doi . [10/01/

AVIRIS NG Hyperspectral Data: Miller, C.E., R.O. Green, D.R. Thompson, A.K. Thorpe, M. Eastwood, I.B. Mccubbin , W. Olson duvall , M. Bernas , C.M. Sarture , S. Nolte, L.M. Rios, M.A. Hernandez, B.D. Bue , and S.R. Lundeen. 2019. ABoVE: Hyperspectral Imagery from AVIRIS NG, Alaskan and Canadian Arctic, 2017 2018. ORNL DAAC, Oak Ridge, T ennessee, USA.