Annual vegetation height images for Australia from GEDI and Landsat data

Brief description

An Australia-wide vegetation height was generated using Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) LiDAR Altimetry (from 2019) and used to train a random forest model to provide vegetation height from Landsat data available in Digital Earth Australia. The Landsat data used for extrapolating vegetation height images were the Annual Fractional Cover product and the Annual Geomedian product. The random forest model was used to generate annual vegetation height from 1988 to 2021. To reduce errors in irrigated agriculture, vegetation height below three metres was set to zero. Refer to the metadata for a description of the method and validation of this product and the Readme.txt for the data format (see Supporting files). This method was developed through the CSIRO Digiscape Future Science Platform and updated as part of the Regional Land and Ecosystem Accounts project, which is funded through the Australian Department of Climate Change, Energy the Environment and Water (DCCEEW).
Lineage: GEDI data are available to download from the NASA EarthData Search website (https://search.earthdata.nasa.gov/search). The Landsat Annual Fractional Cover and Annual Geomedian products data are available through Digital Earth Australia as part of the Collection 3 data (Fractional Cover Percentiles – https://cmi.ga.gov.au/data-products/dea/630/dea-fractional-cover-percentiles-landsat and Geometric Median and Median Absolute Deviation – https://cmi.ga.gov.au/data-products/dea/645/dea-geometric-median-and-median-absolute-deviation-landsat ). Processing was performed on the Australian National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) and the CSIRO Earth Analytics Science and Innovation (EASI) platform, tested using Jupyter notebooks, and batch-processed as python scripts. Images were processed as tiles, then mosaicked to form annual Australia-wide layers.