Lidar remote sensing of savanna biophysical attributes: opportunities, progress, and challenges

ABSTRACT

Despite occupying almost a fifth of the global terrestrial vegetation system, savanna ecosystems are relatively understudied in the Earth observation field. As a result, their contribution to global socioecological functions, such as carbon sequestration, habitat provision, watershed protection, biodiversity, and communal supply of timber and non-timber products, is inadequately accounted for. Since lidar remote sensing has been proved to estimate accurately the three-dimensional structural attributes of vegetation, the author found it insightful to synthesize the application of this technique in the savannas as one of the steps towards addressing this knowledge gap. The synthesis evaluated the progress of current studies that primarily use lidar data in the savannas and identified the associated opportunities and challenges. For each selected application, three main questions are asked: (1) what is typically needed from lidar remote sensing? (2) what have we achieved already? And (3) what is the current status? The last question was further split into two: (a) what is lacking, if any? (b) what challenges need to be addressed? This article concludes by looking into the potential future of lidar remote sensing in the savannas and some recommendations are put forward accordingly.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Dr Michael Lefsky (Colorado State University) for his mentorship during my PhD studies, in which I focused on lidar remote sensing in the savannas, which was my motivation for writing this review article. Special thanks also go to Mr Laven Naidoo (Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, South Africa) for volunteering to edit my first draft of the manuscript and suggesting more ideas to look into.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.