Species-specific combination and calibration between area-based and tree-based diameter distributions using airborne laser scanning

Abstract

The planning of wood procurement requires reliable information about the species-specific timber assortments on which the economic value of a production forest depends. The timber assortments refer to the stem volumes of the sawlog and pulpwood fractions, specified in terms of both timber quality and allowable log dimensions, e.g., the stem diameter at breast height (dbh). We propose here an airborne laser scanning based calibration framework for generating species-specific dbh distributions that combines the area-based approach (ABA) and individual-tree detection (ITD), two established and independent approaches for retrieving forest attributes from airborne laser scanning data. Both ABA- and ITD-derived dbh distributions were generated nonparametrically for pine, spruce, coniferous, deciduous, and all species and assessed with respect to the plot-level species-specific total stem volume (m3·ha–1) and approximations of volume of timber assortments. Although after calibration, the total volume of all species and the volume approximations of coniferous sawlog and spruce pulpwood decreased in accuracy by 4%–7%, the calibration improved the accuracy of the other 12 species-specific estimates by 2%–17%, testifying to the general effectiveness of the proposed calibration framework.