Mapping forests with Lidar provides flexible, accurate data with many uses
The use of remote sensing for forest inventory, fire management and wildlife habitat conservation planning has a decades-long and productive history in California. In the 1980s, mappers transitioned from aerial photography to digital remote sensing, in particular Landsat s...
| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources
2015-01-01
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| Series: | California Agriculture |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://calag.ucanr.edu/archive/?article=ca.v069n01p14 |
| Summary: | The use of remote sensing for forest inventory, fire management and wildlife habitat
conservation planning has a decades-long and productive history in California. In
the 1980s, mappers transitioned from aerial photography to digital remote sensing,
in particular Landsat satellite imagery, which still plays a significant role in forest
mapping, but today mappers increasingly rely on Lidar analysis. In California, where
forests are complex and difficult to accurately map, numerous remote sensing scientists
have pioneered development of methodologies for forest mapping with Lidar. Lidar has
been used successfully here in a number of ways: to capture forest structure, to map
individual trees in forests and critical wildlife habitat characteristics, to predict
forest volume and biomass, to develop inputs for forest fire behavior modeling, and
to map forest topography and infrastructure. Lidar can be costly to acquire and difficult
to analyze, but as costs decline and new data processing methods are developed, it
is likely that forest managers who need detailed information on forest structure across
large spatial scales will incorporate Lidar data into their mapping toolkits. |
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| ISSN: | 0008-0845 2160-8091 |