Retrieval of vertical leaf water content using terrestrial full-waveform lidar

Abstract

The vertical distribution of leaf water content (LWC) within plant canopy plays an important role in light penetration and scattering, thus affecting reflectance simulation with radiative transfer models. Although passive remote sensing techniques have been widely applied to estimate LWC, they are unable to retrieve the LWC vertical distribution within canopy. By providing vertical information, terrestrial LiDAR can potentially overcome this limitation. In this paper we investigated the applicability of the terrestrial full-waveform LiDAR to estimate the LWC vertical profile within the canopy of individual plants. A standard radiometric calibration was applied to convert the amplitude and the echo width to a physically well-defined radiometric quantity, namely the backscatter coefficient. However, the backscatter coefficient is strongly affected by the incidence angle between the laser beam and the leaf normal. In order to compensate for incidence angle effects, reference reflectors (Spectralon from Labsphere, Inc.) were used to build a look-up table to calibrated the backscatter coefficient. Our results showed that the backscatter coefficient had a strong correlation (R 2 = 0.66) with LWC after correcting for the incidence angle effect. Good agreements were achieved between the predicted vertical profile of LWC and the measured vertical profile of LWC with a mean RMSE (root mean square error) value of 0.001 g/cm 2 and a mean MAPE (mean absolute percent error) value of 4.46 %. Our study successfully demonstrated the feasibility of retrieving LWC vertical distribution within plant canopy from a terrestrial full-waveform LiDAR.