Abstract
Accurate canopy base height (CBH) information is essential for forest and fire managers since it constitutes a key indicator of seedling growth, wood quality and forest health as well as a necessary input in fire behavior prediction systems such as FARSITE, FlamMap and BEHAVE. The present study focused on the potential of airborne LiDAR data analysis to estimate plot-level CBH in a dense uneven-aged structured forest on complex terrain. A comparative study of two widely employed methods was performed, namely the voxel-based approach and regression analysis, which revealed a clear outperformance of the latter. More specifically, the voxel-based CBH estimates were found to lack correlation with the reference data ( R 2 = 0.15 , r R M S E = 42.36 % ) while most CBH values were overestimated resulting in an r b i a s of − 17.52 % . On the contrary, cross-validation of the developed regression model showcased an R 2 , r R M S E and r b i a s of 0 . 61 , 18.19 % and − 0.09 % respectively. Overall analysis of the results proved the voxel-based approach incapable of accurately estimating plot-level CBH due to vegetation and topographic heterogeneity of the forest environment, which however didn’t affect the regression analysis performance.
Highlights
Canopy base height (CBH)— not universally defined—commonly refers to the vertical distance between ground surface and the base of the continuous live crown [1,2,3,4,5]
Either on stand or individual tree level, CBH constitutes one of the most important forest structure parameters in several forestry applications. It can be used as an indicator of tree foliage amount and seedling growth [6,7,8], for wood quality estimation [9,10], for crown conditions and forest health evaluation [6,11] as well as in fire behavior prediction systems such as FARSITE, FlamMap and BEHAVE [12,13,14,15,16]
The aim of the present study was to examine the potential of airborne Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) data to accurately estimate CBH at the plot-level in a dense hybrid fir (Abies borisii regis) forest characterized by uneven-aged structure on complex terrain
Summary
Canopy base height (CBH)— not universally defined—commonly refers to the vertical distance between ground surface and the base of the continuous live crown (i.e., lowest branch of the tree crown with live foliage) [1,2,3,4,5]. Either on stand or individual tree level, CBH constitutes one of the most important forest structure parameters in several forestry applications. It can be used as an indicator of tree foliage amount and seedling growth [6,7,8], for wood quality estimation [9,10], for crown conditions and forest health evaluation [6,11] as well as in fire behavior prediction systems such as FARSITE, FlamMap and BEHAVE [12,13,14,15,16]. Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) sensors can penetrate forest canopies and has been proven to successfully retrieve vertical structure information including measures of individual and plot level CBH [18,19,20,21,22,23]
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