Sampling forests with terrestrial laser scanning.

ABSTRACT:

Background and aims

Terrestrial laser scanners (TLSs) have successfully captured various properties of individual trees and have potential to further increase the quality and efficiency of forest surveys. However, TLSs are limited to line of sight observations, and forests are complex structural environments that can occlude TLS beams and thereby cause incomplete TLS samples. We evaluate the prevalence and sources of occlusion that limit line of sight to forest stems for TLS scans, assess the impacts of TLS sample incompleteness, and evaluate sampling strategies and data analysis techniques aimed at improving sample quality and representativeness.

Methods

We use a large number of TLS scans (761), taken across a 255 650-m2 area of forest with detailed field survey data: the H

SUBMITTER: Boucher PB 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8557379 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature