Area-based assessment of forest standing volume by field measurements and airborne laser scanner data

Abstract

Airborne laser scanning (ALS) is increasingly applied as a tool for extracting forest inventory data. In recent years most applications for the assessment of forest standing volume rely on a single tree recognition approach, which generally gives satisfactory results in coniferous forests. The aim of this paper is to apply a raster-based approach for the assessment of forest standing volume based on field measurements and a Digital Canopy Model (DCM) derived from ALS data. In addition, we explore the potential of hot spot analysis of DCM data for automatic forest gap detection, as a means to improve the accuracy of the estimation of forest standing volume by traditional estimation methods.

Acknowledgments

ALS survey was carried out by the Aquater Society, Italy. The authors wish to thank Orazio Ciancio and Enzo Pranzini for providing the forest compartment and ALS data. We are grateful to Roberta Bertini, Giuseppe Bonanno, Francesca Bottalico, Paola Brundu, Valentina Cappelli, Davide Melini, Ilaria Napoli, Franco Piemontese and Nicola Puletti who carried out the field measurements. Special thanks go to two anonymous reviewers and the Editor for the helpful comments that improved an early version of the manuscript.