AI Pack: Vegetation

Description

The vegetation pack includes a vectorized set of layers that delineate above ground vegetation into approximate height based groupings.

Pack layers

• Medium & High Vegetation (>2m)
• Low Vegetation (0.5m-2m)
• Very Low Vegetation (<0.5m)
• Leaf-off Vegetation
• Woody Vegetation
• All-in Vegetation
• Medium and High Vegetation with Woody Vegetation

Availability

Characteristics and Recommended Use

The Medium & High Vegetation (>2m) layer is the most useful and highest quality layer in the group. The other two are best considered as "support" layers, for situations such as overlapping Low and Medium/High vegetation, to denote some ambiguity between a tree and a large bush.

Results tend to be highly robust to leaf-on vs leaf-off situations, although the raster (and corresponding vector features) may be slightly smaller due to the difficulty in identifying the smallest bare branches and twigs on leaf-less trees.

Typical use cases include:

• Vegetation management (identifying where trees overlap with other assets such as buildings or electricity transmission and distribution infrastructure).
• Fire and storm risk assessment for properties and areas.
• Assessing change over time using historical results (for this, we recommend seasonally matched surveys are used).
• Combining with our DSM and DEM data to produce height contours for more detailed analysis.

Nearmap conducted a study on the tree cover changes using the vegetation AI data. Read about this study here: https://www.nearmap.com/au/en/aerial-view-blog/aerial-map-tree-cover-statistics-in-adelaide.

API Notes for Large Objects

The AI Feature API truncates feature classes in the vegetation pack to the intersection of the feature with the query AOI. This is because a vegetation feature can be almost unbounded in size, such as a forest in a national park, which clearly cannot be returned in a sensible way in a single API payload.