Abstract
Abstract. This paper presents a method for reconstructing automatically the quantitative structure model of every tree in a forest plot from terrestrial laser scanner data. A new feature is the automatic extraction of individual trees from the point cloud. The method is tested with a 30-m diameter English oak plot and a 80-m diameter Australian eucalyptus plot. For the oak plot the total biomass was overestimated by about 17 %, when compared to allometry (N = 15), and the modelling time was about 100 min with a laptop. For the eucalyptus plot the total biomass was overestimated by about 8.5 %, when compared to a destructive reference (N = 27), and the modelling time was about 160 min. The method provides accurate and fast tree modelling abilities for, e.g., biomass estimation and ground truth data for airborne measurements at a massive ground scale.
Highlights
The measurement of above-ground forest biomass is important for ecology, carbon storage estimation, forest research, etc
We first present the data used for the examples, we give an outline of the reconstruction method, present the details of the tree extraction and reconstruction methods, and go over some sensitivity analysis
The average relative absolute error for the five tree extraction cases varies from 23.7 % to 25.5 %, and the total plot level biomass overestimation varies from 15.3 % to 18.8 %
Summary
The measurement of above-ground forest biomass is important for ecology, carbon storage estimation, forest research, etc. With terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) and computational methods it is possible to automatically reconstruct accurate and precise 3D models of the tree structure of the scanned trees in minutes (Raumonen et al 2013, Calders et al 2015). We call these models quantitative structure models or QSMs. We call these models quantitative structure models or QSMs They represent the trees as hierarchical collections of cylinders or other building blocks which provide the volume and diameter of branch segments needed to estimate the biomass. The circular cylinder is the best choice for a block type (Akerblom et al 2014)
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