Sierra Nevada Ecoregion LiDAR and Fuels Data, Collected in 2025

Vegetation structure and fuels data are essential for understanding fire behavior following management treatments such as mechanical thinning and prescribed burning. To evaluate these processes, 133 plots were established between July 17 and September 21, 2025 across national forests and parks in the Sierra Nevada. These plots consisted of treated and untreated areas for comparison. Plots were selected using stratified random sampling from treated and untreated areas. Hazardous and undesirable areas were filtered out, including steep slopes, areas near roads, non-federal lands, and areas within recent fire boundaries. Each plot had a diameter of 20 meters and was surveyed at both the transect and plot level. A terrestrial lidar scanner was also used to collect point cloud data at each plot. This data release includes manual fuel metrics in comma-separated values format (CSV), point clouds in the lidar data exchange format (LAS), and a shapefile (SHP) of plot locations.