The canopy height model (CHM) represents area-wide tree canopy heights within the City of Dresden (Germany). The CHM provides spatially explicit information on urban forest structure enabling the assessment of the small-scale impacts of urban trees and strategically managing the ecosystem services they provide. The high-resolution raster layer has a cell size of 0.5 meter and maps the height of the upper crown layer above the underlying ground. The CHM was derived from a classification of the urban forest in a LiDAR point cloud using a data fusion approach combining LiDAR with multispectral imagery and a 3D building model. LiDAR data were acquired in 2017. The classification is described in detail in this article. The raster is available as a single-band GeoTIFF in the coordinate system ETRS89/UTM zone 33 (EPSG: 25833). The source data used was made freely available by the “Landesamt für Geobasisinformation Sachsen” (GeoSN) under the license "Data license Germany - attribution - Version 2.0" and can be downloaded under the following links: LiDAR: https://www.geodaten.sachsen.de/downloadbereich-digitale-hoehenmodelle-4851.html 3D Building Model: https://www.geodaten.sachsen.de/downloadbereich-digitale-3d-stadtmodelle-4875.html Aerial Imagery: https://www.geodaten.sachsen.de/downloadbereich-dop-4826.html

The City of Dresden supported generation and validation of the dataset by providing the municipal tree inventory. The research contributed to the project "Standard-BIPV-System" (FKZ: 03EE1061C) funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action.