Theory of Canopy Cover

Canopy Cover is the percentage of vertical projection of forest canopy to forest land area (Jennings et al.,1999). It is an important parameter in forest management, and it is also an essential factor for estimating forest volume.

Principle Description

LiDAR360 adopts two different algorithms for calculating canopy cover for point cloud with and without return number information respectively. If the point cloud has return number information, it will be first divided into different grids according to a user-defined xsize and ysize.

If the point cloud hasn’t return number information. For a certain statistical unit, canopy cover can be calculated as the ratio of vegetation points to total points. Similar to the calculation of Theory of Gap Fraction, points higher than the height threshold in the calculation process are considered as vegetation points.

According to (Ma et al., 2017), the canopy cover generated from these two methods have no significant difference. The resultant product is a raster file in TIFF format, the value ranges from 0 (no canopy cover/completely open) to 1 (completely covered by canopy).

    @inproceedings{
        author={Jennings S B, Brown N D and Sheil D},
        title={Assessing forest canopies and understorey illumination: canopy closure, canopy cover and other measures},
        booktitle={Forestry,72(1): 59-73},
        year={1999}
    }

    @inproceedings{
        author={Ma Q, Su Y J and Guo Q H},
        title={Comparison of Canopy Cover Estimations From Airborne LiDAR, Aerial Imagery, and Satellite Imagery.},
        booktitle={IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing,10(9): 4225-4236},
        year={2017}
    }