Assessing indicators of forest sustainability using lidar remote sensing

• Main Author: Bater, Christopher William
• Language: English
• Published: University of British Columbia 2008
• Subjects: Lidar; Digital elevation models; Forest sustainability; Wildlife trees; Remote sensing
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2429/599

The Province of British Columbia is developing a suite of attributes to assess and monitor forest sustainability. Each attribute is in turn evaluated using a variety of indicators. Recently, digital remote sensing technologies have emerged as both alternative and supplement to traditional monitoring techniques, with light detection and ranging (lidar) in particular showing great promise for estimating a variety of indicators. The goal of this thesis was to review and assess the ability of lidar to estimate selected indicators of forest sustainability. Specifically, digital elevation model (DEM) interpolation (from which indicators are extracted both directly and indirectly) and wildlife tree class distributions were examined. Digital elevation models are a key derivative of lidar data, and their generation is a critical step in the data processing stream. A validation exercise was undertaken to determine which combination of interpolation routine and spatial resolution was the most accurate. Ground returns were randomly subsetted into prediction and validation datasets. Linear, quintic, natural neighbour, spline with tension, regularized spline, inverse distance weighting, and ANUDEM interpolation routines were used to generate surfaces at spatial resolutions of 0.5, 1.0, and 1.5 m. The 0.5 m natural neighbour surface was found to be the most accurate (RMSE=0.17 m). Classification and regression tree analysis indicated that slope and ground return density were the best predictors of interpolation error. The amount and variability of living and dead wood in a forest stand is an important indicator of forest biodiversity. In the second study, the capacity of lidar to estimate the distribution of living and dead trees within forests is investigated. Twenty-two field plots were established in which each stem (DBH>10cm) was assigned to a wildlife tree (WT) class. For each plot, a suite of lidar-derived predictor variables were extracted. Ordinal logistic regression was then employed to predict the cumulative proportions of stems within the WT classes. Results indicated that the coefficient of variation of the lidar height data was the best predictor variable (r = 0.85, p <0.000, RMSE = 4.9%). The derived relationships allowed for the prediction of the proportion of stems within WT classes across the landscape.