A new MAMBO data paper presents a standardised set of LiDAR vegetation structure metrics derived from airborne laser scanning (ALS) data, offering valuable insights for cross-site ecological monitoring and habitat assessment across Europe. The study, led by Prof. W. Daniel Kissling and co-authored by Wouter Mulder, Jie Wang, and Yuxuan Shi, provides harmonised datasets for the project's seven demonstration sites in five European countries, enabling consistent vegetation analysis at landscape scale.
The study provides 35 LiDAR-based raster metrics in GeoTIFF format, processed using the Laserfarm workflow. These metrics describe vegetation height, cover, vertical structure, and other structural features across demonstration sites located in Denmark, France, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and Malta. The datasets cover a wide range of habitat types, including woodlands, grasslands, wetlands, and Mediterranean shrublands.
The data were derived from national ALS surveys and processed using a standardised computational workflow—Laserfarm—built on the open-source Laserchicken module. The process includes re-tiling, normalisation, feature extraction, and rasterisation, and was executed on the SURF infrastructure in the Netherlands.
The following resources accompany the publication:
Zenodo repository containing Jupyter Notebooks for the Laserfarm workflow, derived data products (GeoTIFFs), visualisations (PDF maps), and site boundaries (shapefiles):
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14745309
WorkflowHub entry hosting the Laserfarm Jupyter Notebooks:
https://workflowhub.eu/projects/302#workflows
Public repository for the clipped ALS point cloud data used in the study (excluding Comino, Malta):
https://doi.org/10.48546/workflowhub.datafile.5.1
This dataset supports landscape-scale ecological monitoring and enables further research into vegetation structure and biodiversity across European habitats. It also contributes to the standardisation of LiDAR-derived metrics for site-specific monitoring and transnational biodiversity assessment efforts such as Natura 2000.
