Abstract
In recent decades, remote sensing techniques and the associated hardware and software have made substantial improvements. With satellite images that can obtain sub-meter spatial resolution, and new hardware, particularly unmanned aerial vehicles and systems, there are many emerging opportunities for improved data acquisition, including variable temporal and spectral resolutions. Combined with the evolution of techniques for aerial remote sensing, such as full wave laser scanners, hyperspectral scanners, and aerial radar sensors, the potential to incorporate this new data in forest management is enormous. Here we provide an overview of the current state-of-the-art remote sensing techniques for large forest areas thousands or tens of thousands of hectares. We examined modern remote sensing techniques used to obtain forest data that are directly applicable to decision making issues, and we provided a general overview of the types of data that can be obtained using remote sensing. The most easily accessible forest variable described in many works is stand or tree height, followed by other inventory variables like basal area, tree number, diameters, and volume, which are crucial in decision making process, especially for thinning and harvest planning, and timber transport optimization. Information about zonation and species composition are often described as more difficult to assess; however, this information usually is not required on annual basis. Counts of studies on forest health show an increasing trend in the last years, mostly in context of availability of new sensors as well as increased forest vulnerability caused by climate change; by virtue to modern sensors interesting methods were developed for detection of stressed or damaged trees. Unexpectedly few works focus on regeneration and seedlings evaluation; though regenerated stands should be regularly monitored in order to maintain forest cover sustainability.
Highlights
The forest management, in a simplified form, can be understood as human interaction with forest ecosystems with the purpose of providing goods and benefits for society and at the same time protecting as much as possible the ecosystem itself
An opportunity for new precise applications of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) was the improved positioning with the use real-time kinematics (RTK) global navigation satellite system (GNSS) positioning [16,17] that allows record the actual position of the carrier and the acquired data with centimeter-level accuracy
Among those properties we describe above all: zones and strata of forests, detection of regeneration, canopy height estimation, individual tree delineation, diameter or in coarser scale basal area, canopy closure, and the growing stock
Summary
The forest management, in a simplified form, can be understood as human interaction with forest ecosystems with the purpose of providing goods and benefits for society and at the same time protecting as much as possible the ecosystem itself. In forestry and related nature management fields, the second link of the management chain, i.e., Dynamics, is crucial for the good decision making practices as well, because forest is a long term ecosystem (in contrast to agriculture crops for example) usually overpassing the human life span. Mapping of geometrical borders of compartments that can be understood as delineation of homogeneous areas or so called stratification (the utilization of the term stratification here is not to be confused with vertical stratification). We utilized ISI web of Knowledge search engine and Google scholar search engine for assessment of individual keywords from this list or in combination with carrier required to evaluate (e.g., satellite, airplane, or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV)) because we wanted to give here full overview of remote sensing possibilities from all aspects and resolution
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