Extracted trails from airborne laser scanning in the Oostvaardersplassen nature reserve

Ungulates and other mammalian herbivores can create trails in dense vegetation by trampling and browsing. This can affect vegetation structure and results in the fragmentation of closed, high vegetation, with subsequent impacts on biodiversity. Manually mapping trails in the field or from aerial photographs can be challenging and time consuming, especially in inaccessible or difficult to access habitats such as wetlands and if trails occur beneath the canopy. Airborne laser scanning provides an alternative method because it penetrates vegetation canopies and efficiently obtains highly accurate data in the form of dense 3D point clouds. This repository consists of extracted trails in the wetland area of the Oostvaardersplassen nature reserve in the Netherlands using 3D airborne point cloud data (AHN4) and the manually created 50 plots of ground truth in two regions, i.e. grazed only by red deer and grazed by both red deer and geese. The data product has been generated in the context of the EU project MAMBO (Modern Approaches to the Monitoring of Biоdiversity, https://doi.org/10.3897/rio.9.e116951).

IdentificationAbout this resource

Alternate Identifier: 3405dbef-6878-410d-98a0-343410e53ae0

Publication Date: 2025-03-24

Title: Extracted trails from airborne laser scanning in the Oostvaardersplassen nature reserve

Short Name

Abstract: Ungulates and other mammalian herbivores can create trails in dense vegetation by trampling and browsing. This can affect vegetation structure and results in the fragmentation of closed, high vegetation, with subsequent impacts on biodiversity. Manually mapping trails in the field or from aerial photographs can be challenging and time consuming, especially in inaccessible or difficult to access habitats such as wetlands and if trails occur beneath the canopy. Airborne laser scanning provides an alternative method because it penetrates vegetation canopies and efficiently obtains highly accurate data in the form of dense 3D point clouds. This repository consists of extracted trails in the wetland area of the Oostvaardersplassen nature reserve in the Netherlands using 3D airborne point cloud data (AHN4) and the manually created 50 plots of ground truth in two regions, i.e. grazed only by red deer and grazed by both red deer and geese. The data product has been generated in the context of the EU project MAMBO (Modern Approaches to the Monitoring of Biоdiversity, https://doi.org/10.3897/rio.9.e116951).