Area-based assessment of forest standing volume by field measurements and airborne laser scanner data

摘要

Airborne laser scanning (ALS) is increasingly applied as a tool for extracting forestinventory data. In recent years most applications for the assessment of foreststanding volume rely on a single tree recognition approach, which generally givessatisfactory results in coniferous forests. The aim of this paper is to apply a rasterbasedapproach for the assessment of forest standing volume based on fieldmeasurements and a Digital Canopy Model (DCM) derived from ALS data. Inaddition, we explore the potential of hot spot analysis of DCM data for automaticforest gap detection, as a means to improve the accuracy of the estimation of foreststanding volume by traditional estimation methods.