@5b6411ac yes, there’s quite a bit of LIDAR data from across Canterbury: https://koordinates.com/data/?q=Lidar+Canterbury. 

If you’re interested in having a go at this in R, perhaps we can get together and share code, I’ve got quite a bit of ground-based biodiversity data form across wider Christchurch, that I expect could be explained by the cover and height of vegetation that could be extracted from LIDAR data. I haven’t got around to trying that yet but it’s on my to-do list. 

 @f4f101c0 That sounds interesting. Please let me think how could one proceed with that.