The Use of Airborne Laser Mapping in the Recovery Strategy for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker

摘要

One of the emerging applications of lidar remote sensing is for habitat charactertization and monitoring. The reappearance of the effectively extinct ivory-billed woodpecker has prompted great efforts to identify potential habitat to aid in search and recovery efforts. In this paper we detail our efforts to map ivory-billed woodpecker habitat using a medium-footprint waveform lidar instrument (LVIS). LVIS was used to map over 1 million acres of vertical and spatial forest structure. Variables such as tree density, basal area and canopy cover were derived from these data and are being used in the hunt for the rare species.