Lidar Applications in Precision Forestry

Precision forestry leverages advance technology sensing and analytical tools to support sitespecific economic, environmental, and sustainable decision making for the forestry sector. The discipline is highly reliant on accurate, timely and detailed forest inventory characterization and structural information, spanning extensive land holdings. Discrete, high density, lidar point cloud has become an invaluable dataset utilized in precision forestry applications. This paper gives a synopsis of a research with aerial and terrestrial lidar to provide detailed forest inventory characteristics such as canopy heights and volumes as well as diameter at breast height. The estimation of Leaf Area Index (LAI) and forest fuel metrics are also addressed. The results presented here summarize the achievable accuracies and future goals of applied lidar remote sensing research in the field of precision forestry.

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