scholarly journals Regionalization of an Existing Global Forest Canopy Height Model for Forests of the Southern United States

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (9) ◽  
pp. 1722
Author(s):  
Nian-Wei Ku ◽  
Sorin Popescu ◽  
Marian Eriksson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Forest Canopy ◽  
Airborne Lidar ◽  
Canopy Height ◽  
Southern United States ◽  
Biomass Estimation ◽  
Lidar Data ◽  
Local Data ◽  
Airborne Lidar Data

A large-scale global canopy height map (GCHM) is essential for global forest aboveground biomass estimation. Four GCHMs have recently been built using data from the Geoscience Laser Altimeter System (GLAS) sensor aboard the Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat), along with auxiliary spatial and climate information. The main objectives of this research were to find out how well a selected GCHM agrees with airborne lidar data from locations in the southern United States and to recalibrate that GCHM to more closely match the forest canopy heights found in the region. The airborne lidar resource was built from data collected between 2010 and 2012, available from in-house and publicly available sources, for sites that included a variety of vegetation types across the southern United States. EPA ecoregions were used to provide ecosystem information for the southern United States. The airborne lidar data were pre-processed to provide lidar-derived metrics, and assigned to four height categories—namely, returns from above 0 m, 1 m, 3 m, and 5 m. The assessment phase results indicated that the 90th and 95th percentiles of the airborne lidar height values were well-suited for use in the recalibration phase of the study. Simple linear regression was used to generate a new, recalibrated GCHM. It was concluded that the characterization of the agreement of a selected GCHM with local data, followed by the recalibration of the existing GCHM to the local region, is both viable and essential for future GCHMs in studies conducted at large scales.

scholarly journals Influence of voxel size on forest canopy height estimates using full-waveform airborne LiDAR data

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Cheng Wang ◽  
Shezhou Luo ◽  
Xiaohuan Xi ◽  
Sheng Nie ◽  
Dan Ma ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Forest Canopy ◽  
Airborne Lidar ◽  
Canopy Height ◽  
Lidar Data ◽  
Voxel Size ◽  
Height Estimates ◽  
Full Waveform ◽  
Airborne Lidar Data

scholarly journals Assessing and Correcting Topographic Effects on Forest Canopy Height Retrieval Using Airborne LiDAR Data

Sensors ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 15 (6) ◽  
pp. 12133-12155 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhugeng Duan ◽  
Dan Zhao ◽  
Yuan Zeng ◽  
Yujin Zhao ◽  
Bingfang Wu ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Forest Canopy ◽  
Airborne Lidar ◽  
Canopy Height ◽  
Lidar Data ◽  
Topographic Effects ◽  
Airborne Lidar Data

scholarly journals Cloth simulation-based construction of pit-free canopy height models from airborne LiDAR data

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Wuming Zhang ◽  
Shangshu Cai ◽  
Xinlian Liang ◽  
Jie Shao ◽  
Ronghai Hu ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Tree Height ◽  
Point Clouds ◽  
Airborne Lidar ◽  
Canopy Height ◽  
Lidar Data ◽  
Cloth Simulation ◽  
Simulation Based ◽  
Maximum Tree Height ◽  
Airborne Lidar Data ◽  
Better Than

Abstract Background The universal occurrence of randomly distributed dark holes (i.e., data pits appearing within the tree crown) in LiDAR-derived canopy height models (CHMs) negatively affects the accuracy of extracted forest inventory parameters. Methods We develop an algorithm based on cloth simulation for constructing a pit-free CHM. Results The proposed algorithm effectively fills data pits of various sizes whilst preserving canopy details. Our pit-free CHMs derived from point clouds at different proportions of data pits are remarkably better than those constructed using other algorithms, as evidenced by the lowest average root mean square error (0.4981 m) between the reference CHMs and the constructed pit-free CHMs. Moreover, our pit-free CHMs show the best performance overall in terms of maximum tree height estimation (average bias = 0.9674 m). Conclusion The proposed algorithm can be adopted when working with different quality LiDAR data and shows high potential in forestry applications.

scholarly journals An energy minimization approach to automated extraction of regular building footprints from airborne LiDAR data

2014 ◽  
Vol II-3 ◽  
pp. 65-72 ◽  
Author(s):  
Y. He ◽  
C. Zhang ◽  
C. S. Fraser
Keyword(s):  
Energy Function ◽  
Energy Minimization ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Spatial Information ◽  
Structural Complexity ◽  
Airborne Lidar ◽  
Lidar Data ◽  
Urban Scenes ◽  
Irregular Point ◽  
Airborne Lidar Data

This paper presents an automated approach to the extraction of building footprints from airborne LiDAR data based on energy minimization. Automated 3D building reconstruction in complex urban scenes has been a long-standing challenge in photogrammetry and computer vision. Building footprints constitute a fundamental component of a 3D building model and they are useful for a variety of applications. Airborne LiDAR provides large-scale elevation representation of urban scene and as such is an important data source for object reconstruction in spatial information systems. However, LiDAR points on building edges often exhibit a jagged pattern, partially due to either occlusion from neighbouring objects, such as overhanging trees, or to the nature of the data itself, including unavoidable noise and irregular point distributions. The explicit 3D reconstruction may thus result in irregular or incomplete building polygons. In the presented work, a vertex-driven Douglas-Peucker method is developed to generate polygonal hypotheses from points forming initial building outlines. The energy function is adopted to examine and evaluate each hypothesis and the optimal polygon is determined through energy minimization. The energy minimization also plays a key role in bridging gaps, where the building outlines are ambiguous due to insufficient LiDAR points. In formulating the energy function, hard constraints such as parallelism and perpendicularity of building edges are imposed, and local and global adjustments are applied. The developed approach has been extensively tested and evaluated on datasets with varying point cloud density over different terrain types. Results are presented and analysed. The successful reconstruction of building footprints, of varying structural complexity, along with a quantitative assessment employing accurate reference data, demonstrate the practical potential of the proposed approach.

scholarly journals Estimating Time Since the Last Stand-Replacing Disturbance (TSD) from Spaceborne Simulated GEDI Data: A Feasibility Study

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (21) ◽  
pp. 3506
Author(s):  
Nuria Sanchez-Lopez ◽  
Luigi Boschetti ◽  
Andrew T. Hudak ◽  
Steven Hancock ◽  
Laura I. Duncanson
Keyword(s):  
Data Fusion ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Airborne Lidar ◽  
Ecosystem Dynamics ◽  
Training Dataset ◽  
Lidar Data ◽  
Landsat 8 ◽  
Image Objects ◽  
Airborne Lidar Data

Stand-level maps of past forest disturbances (expressed as time since disturbance, TSD) are needed to model forest ecosystem processes, but the conventional approaches based on remotely sensed satellite data can only extend as far back as the first available satellite observations. Stand-level analysis of airborne LiDAR data has been demonstrated to accurately estimate long-term TSD (~100 years), but large-scale coverage of airborne LiDAR remains costly. NASA’s spaceborne LiDAR Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) instrument, launched in December 2018, is providing billions of measurements of tropical and temperate forest canopies around the globe. GEDI is a spatial sampling instrument and, as such, does not provide wall-to-wall data. GEDI’s lasers illuminate ground footprints, which are separated by ~600 m across-track and ~60 m along-track, so new approaches are needed to generate wall-to-wall maps from the discrete measurements. In this paper, we studied the feasibility of a data fusion approach between GEDI and Landsat for wall-to-wall mapping of TSD. We tested the methodology on a ~52,500-ha area located in central Idaho (USA), where an extensive record of stand-replacing disturbances is available, starting in 1870. GEDI data were simulated over the nominal two-year planned mission lifetime from airborne LiDAR data and used for TSD estimation using a random forest (RF) classifier. Image segmentation was performed on Landsat-8 data, obtaining image-objects representing forest stands needed for the spatial extrapolation of estimated TSD from the discrete GEDI locations. We quantified the influence of (1) the forest stand map delineation, (2) the sample size of the training dataset, and (3) the number of GEDI footprints per stand on the accuracy of estimated TSD. The results show that GEDI-Landsat data fusion would allow for TSD estimation in stands covering ~95% of the study area, having the potential to reconstruct the long-term disturbance history of temperate even-aged forests with accuracy (median root mean square deviation = 22.14 years, median BIAS = 1.70 years, 60.13% of stands classified within 10 years of the reference disturbance date) comparable to the results obtained in the same study area with airborne LiDAR.

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