Forestry Applications of Airborne Laser Scanning

Abstract

Aims & Scope:Well-managed forests and woodlands are a renewable resource, producing essential raw material with minimum waste and energy use. Rich in habitat and species diversity, forests may contribute to increased ecosystem stability. They can absorb the effects of unwanted deposition and other disturbances and protect neighbouring ecosystems by maintaining stable nutrient and energy cycles and by preventing soil degradation and erosion. They provide much-needed recreation and their continued existence contributes to stabilizing rural communities.Forests are managed for timber production and species, habitat and process conservation. A subtle shift from multiple-use management to ecosystems management is being observed and the new ecological perspective of multi-functional forest management is based on the principles of ecosystem diversity, stability and elasticity, and the dynamic equilibrium of primary and secondary production.Making full use of new technology is one of the challenges facing forest management today. Resource information must be obtained with a limited budget. This requires better timing of resource assessment activities and improved use of multiple data sources. Sound ecosystems management, like any other management activity, relies on effective forecasting and operational control.The aim of the book series Managing Forest Ecosystems is to present state-of-the-art research results relating to the practice of forest management. Contributions are solicited from prominent authors. Each reference book, monograph or proceedings volume will be focused to deal with a specific context. Typical issues of the series are: resource assessment techniques, evaluating sustainability for even-aged and uneven-aged forests, multi-objective management, predicting forest development, optimizing forest management, biodiversity management and monitoring, risk assessment and economic analysis. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. Exempted from this legal reservation are brief excerpts in connection with reviews or scholarly analysis or material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work. Duplication of this publication or parts thereof is permitted only under the provisions of the Copyright Law of the Publisher's location, in its current version, and permission for use must always be obtained from Springer. Permissions for use may be obtained through RightsLink at the Copyright Clearance Center. Violations are liable to prosecution under the respective Copyright Law. The use of general descriptive names...

Mapping forest attributes using data from stereophotogrammetry of aerial images and field data from the national forest inventory

“…Airborne Laser Scanning (ALS) based forest inventories are now common practice in many countries Vauhkonen et al 2014). For large forest holders or groups of small forest holders with regionally concentrated forest holdings e.g., forest companies, dedicated ALS campaigns together with simultaneous field inventories of training plots is feasible, but is not cost-efficient for small forest holdings.…”

“…Basal area weighted mean height (Hbw), basal area weighted mean diameter (Dbw), stem volume (Vol), and basal area (BA) are mapped using the area-based approach (Naesset 2002;Naesset 2014). Model performance is reported at plot level and for different forest types and compared with model performance from ALS based models.…”

Multi-source forest inventory data for forest production and utilization analyses at different levels

“…For example in Finland, the traditional stand-level field assessment for forest planning was replaced by a new inventory system based on ALS, aerial photographs and field measurements on reference sample plots (Maltamo and Packalen 2014). The inventory proceeds area by area and is targeted for completion in 10 years (2010)(2011)(2012)(2013)(2014)(2015)(2016)(2017)(2018)(2019)(2020).…”

Using low density LiDAR data to map Mediterranean forest characteristics by means of an area-based approach and height threshold analysis

“…Optical remotely sensed data is often used for such purposes; however, it is often difficult to estimate the parameters in areas characterized by a complex forest structure. During the past three decades, airborne LiDAR has become an established method for accurate derivation of the most important forest inventory parameters (Maltamo et al, 2014).…”