ICESAT2VEGR: R PACKAGE FOR VISUALIZING, ANALYZING AND PROCESSING ICESAT-2 DATA FOR VEGETATION APPLICATIONS

ICESat-2 mission was initially designed to measure ice and glacier elevation, however the ATL08-derived product highlighted its suitability for land and vegetation applications. Therefore, herein we propose the ICESat2VegR, an open-source R package designed for working with the ICESat-2 data for land and vegetation
applications, including functions for extracting data from the HDF5 hierarchical structure, clipping, visualizing, transforming, processing data and modeling by integrating with Google Earth Engine (GEE). In the present work, we demonstrate the typical workflow and discuss some of the technical considerations and design solutions we propose to make it a useful and maintainable tool. As an open-source project, we emphasize that the package will undergo continuous development and is anticipated to incorporate additional features.