ALS Forestry Analysis in LiDAR360

Introduction

LiDAR technology enables us to capture horizontal and vertical information of the forest canopy. High density LiDAR point cloud allows users to measure not only forest metrics at a stand scale but also attributes of single trees. LiDAR technology has been an important approach for forestry study and applications.

In this tutorial, you will learn to use LiDAR360's ALS Forest module to process aerial (both UAV and airborne) LiDAR point cloud data, and calculate Forest Metrics such as Height Metrics, Canopy Cover, and Leaf Area Index, as well as single tree attributes such as tree locations, counts, heights, canopy diameters, canopy areas, and canopy volumes. Other metrics like biomass and growing stock volumes can be achieved through regression analysis in accordance with survey data in sample areas.

Software requirement

Please download the latest version of LiDAR360 from the GreenValley International official website, and install and activate following instructions in the User Guide.

Sample data

The Sample Data folder provides sample datasets for the following exercises:

• Exercise1: ALSData.LiData
• Exercise2:
  • ALSData_Remove Outliers.LiData
  • ALSData_Remove Outliers_Normalize by DEM.LiData