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Abstract
Since around 1995, extensive research efforts have been made in Scandinavia to develop airborne Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) as an operational tool for wall-to-wall mapping of forest stands for planning purposes. Scanning LIDAR has the ability to capture the entire three-dimensional structure of forest canopies and has therefore proved to be a very efficient technique to determine biophysical properties such as stand volume and biomass. In Norway and Sweden, airborne scanning LIDAR is now used operationally to estimate merchantable volume on forest stands remotely across areas from 50 km2 to 2,000 km2. Complete scanning LIDAR coverage over larger regions (e.g., counties, States, provinces, and countries) is not economically feasible at this time due to data acquisition and processing costs. Despite these challenges, it has been demonstrated that airborne profiling LIDARs can provide reliable estimates of forest volume and biomass when used in a sampling mode (i.e., a number of flight lines are flown as linear, parallel transects separated by many kilometers). Scanning systems can be similarly employed for regional forest inventory by considering the flight lines as part of a strip sampling design. In this article, we report on a joint research effort by the Norwegian University of Life Sciences, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Norwegian national forest inventory (NFI), Yale University, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, and Swedish NFI to develop and test airborne LIDARs as regional forest sampling tools.
Parent Publication
Citation
Naesset, Erik; Gobakken, Terje; Nelson, Ross. 2009. Sampling and mapping forest volume and biomass using airborne LIDARs. In: McRoberts, Ronald E.; Reams, Gregory A.; Van Deusen, Paul C.; McWilliams, William H., eds. Proceedings of the eighth annual forest inventory and analysis symposium; 2006 October 16-19; Monterey, CA. Gen. Tech. Report WO-79. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service. 297-301.
