TLS Forestry Analysis in LiDAR360

Introduction

Attributes of tree individuals such as diameter at breast height (DBH) is an important forest inventory metric to collect when analyzing tree growth. Traditional DBH measurement techniques that make use of DBH tapes or calipers require the data collector to make physical contact with each tree inventoried. This contact requirement can make field work slow, labor intensive, and, in certain situations, dangerous.

Ground-based or Terrestrial Laser Scanning (TLS) systems offer forest biometricians an alternative to traditional techniques for determining individual tree DBH values. These LiDAR-based remote sensing technologies are capable of generating high-resolution point clouds that encode canopy and sub-canopy forest structures as 3D-coordinate sets. These point clouds can then serve as digital twins of individual trees from which DBH values can be extracted.

LiDAR360’s TLS Forest module allows users to collect from point clouds forest inventory data. In this tutorial, the TLS Forest module is used to process TLS point cloud data, acquired with GVI’s LiBackpack D50, and find individual tree attributes including location, DBH, height, crown diameter, crown area, crown volume, crown base height (CBH), as well as bole or trunk straightness.

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 this tutorial: TLSData.LiData.

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