Individual tree point clouds and tree measurements from multi-platform laser scanning in German forests

Abstract. Laser scanning from different acquisition platforms enables collecting 3D point clouds from different perspectives and with varying resolutions. Such point clouds allow us to e.g., retrieve information about the forest structure and individual tree properties, or to model individual trees in 3D. We conducted airborne laser scanning (ALS), UAV-borne laser scanning (ULS) and terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) in German mixed forests with species typical for Central Europe. We provide the spatially overlapping, georeferenced point clouds of the different acquisitions. As a result of individual tree extraction, we furthermore present a comprehensive database of tree point clouds and corresponding tree metrics, both measured in the field and derived from the point clouds. Our dataset may be used for the creation of 3D tree models for radiative transfer modeling or LiDAR simulation studies or to fit allometric equations between point cloud metrics and forest inventory variables. It can further serve as a benchmark dataset for different algorithms and machine learning tasks, in particular automated individual tree segmentation, tree species classification or forest inventory metric prediction. The dataset and supplementary metadata are available for download on the PANGAEA data publisher at https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.933426 (Weiser et al., 2021b).