High Resolution Canopy Structure and Density Metrics for Southwest Colorado Derived from 2019 Aerial Lidar (100-Meter Resolution Data)

Canopy Density and Canopy Structure Metrics were derived for the San Juan Mountains of Southwest Colorado from Aerial point cloud data at a 1-meter resolution. The aerial Lidar data originated from the ‘CO_Southwest_NRCS_2018’ project prepared by Quantum Spatial for the USGS from a series of flyovers between 2018 and 2019 and were made available in 2021. Canopy Density metrics include Canopy Closure (CC) and Leaf Area Index (LAI). Canopy Structure metrics include total gap area, mean distance to canopy, canopy edginess to the south and canopy edginess to the north. These Canopy Density and Canopy Structure Metrics were used to partition 100 m grid cells over the same area for a snow melt model called SNOWMODEL. Each grid cell was portioned [...]