What is it about?
A design-based approach is presented for the lidar-assisted estimation of forest standing volume when ground surveys are performed by means of fixed-area plots. The airborne lidar measurement of the height of the upper canopy (digital crown model) is performed for the whole study area, and the resulting pixel heights are adopted as auxiliary information to couple with the standing volume acquired on the ground by means of sample plots. The ratio estimator for the total volume of the forest is derived in a complete design-based framework together with an unbiased estimator of its sampling variance and the corresponding confidence interval.
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Why is it important?
With the advent of airborne laser scanning (ALS), the techniques for obtaining information on forest structural attributes from remotely sensed data are approaching operational feasibility. In this perspective, the lidar-assisted estimation proposed here can effectively and robustly support the provision of reliable estimates of the volume of forest stands under an area-based method that exploits lidar measurements without the need to detect single trees in a stand.
Perspectives
The method is very cost-effective to support forest inventories in many situations. It is based on raster DCM (digital crown model) whose determination from ALS data is straightforward. Moreover, raster DCM is very often available at low or even no cost from ALS surveys carried out for purposes other than forest inventories (while it is usually much harder or more expensive to get the whole original data sets of back-scattered signal returns from external sources, as is required to calculate other ALS metrics).
Piermaria Corona
CREA Research Centre for Forestry and Wood
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Area-based lidar-assisted estimation of forest standing volume, Canadian Journal of Forest Research, November 2008, Canadian Science Publishing,
DOI: 10.1139/x08-122.
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