Airborne Laser Scanning Based Forest Inventory: Comparison of Experimental Results for the Perm Region, Russia and Prior Results from Finland

Tuomo Kauranne,Ville-Matti Vartio,Virpi Junttila,Maria Villikka,Sergey Pyankov,Andrey Tarasov,Alexander Kedrov,Sanna Sirparanta,Jussi Peuhkurinen,Anton Kuzmin

doi:10.3390/f8030072

Abstract

Airborne laser scanning (ALS) based stand level forest inventory has been used in Finland and other Nordic countries for several years. In the Russian Federation, ALS is not extensively used for forest inventory purposes, despite a long history of research into the use of lasers for forest measurement that dates back to the 1970s. Furthermore, there is also no generally accepted ALS-based methodology that meets the official inventory requirements of the Russian Federation. In this paper, a method developed for Finnish forest conditions is applied to ALS-based forest inventory in the Perm region of Russia. Sparse Bayesian regression is used with ALS data, SPOT satellite images and field reference data to estimate five forest parameters for three species groups (pine, spruce, deciduous): total mean volume, basal area, mean tree diameter, mean tree height, and number of stems per hectare. Parameter estimates are validated at both the plot level and stand level, and the validation results are compared to results published for three Finnish test areas. Overall, relative root mean square errors (RMSE) were higher for forest parameters in the Perm region than for the Finnish sites at both the plot and stand level. At the stand level, relative RMSE generally decreased with increasing stand size and was lower when considered overall than for individual species groups.

Highlights

Airborne laser scanning (ALS) based forest inventory has been in operational use in Nordic countries for several years [1,2]
The sample plot data were sampled by first selecting stands and, on average, seven plots were systematically placed inside a stand
The stand level validation was generated from the sample plot data used in the estimation, as done in Matalansalo 2007, with the difference that in Perm, the initial plot sample was not done at stand level, and the stands were artificially generated by ordering the plots based on species group and mean volume and aggregating artificial stands from the ordered list

Summary

Introduction

Airborne laser scanning (ALS) based forest inventory has been in operational use in Nordic countries for several years [1,2]. Current operational applications are based on an area-based method developed in Norway in 1997 [3] and developed further by Finnish researchers [4,5] to meet the requirement that the inventory results should contain estimates for species distribution in mixed species stands. Unlike the method presented in [2], the Finnish application does not include pre-stratification based on main tree species or forest development class. ALS data planned nominal density points m2, included. SPOT 5 satellite field reference data with (fieldasample plots) and anpoint existing stand of database. 4 points per m , SPOT 5 satellite images, field reference data (field sample plots) and an existing.

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Discussion

Conclusion