lidar

Scanning the forest from the ground, the air and from space!
For many years, Dr Christine Stone of the NSW Department of Primary Industries has been leading research projects around the use of remote platforms equipped with various types of sensor to capture high resolution data that will aid forest management. The technology has become operational in plantation forestry in support of research assessment and planning ...Read More

New technology to remotely assess individual trees
While foresters don’t necessarily have to abandon their diameter tapes and vertex hypsometers, there is no denying that rapidly-evolving remote sensing technologies are revolutionising forest management practices. Field-based inventory methods and sampling designs can estimate variables such as height, volume, basal area and number of trees fairly accurately, if enough sampling plots are included, but ...Read More

Optimising remotely acquired, dense point cloud data for plantation inventory
This project was designed to harness the rapid technological advances being made in the capture and processing of dense point cloud data as a tool for forest estate management. It involved multi-discipline collaboration with commercial plantation growers, lead forest industry service providers and robotics scientists to ensure the delivery of efficient, resource assessment products.  This ...Read More

Detecting wildings using Lidar and aerial imagery
Scientists in Scion’s Geomatics team have found wilding conifers can be detected in grasslands using a combination of Lidar and multi-spectral values obtained from aerial imagery.  Self-propagating conifers are invading indigenous and semi-native grass and shrub lands across large areas of New Zealand. Detecting and eradicating wildings before they start to produce cones is vital ...Read More

Multi-sensor modelling of a forest productivity
An understanding of how plantation productivity varies spatially is important for forest planning, management and projection of future plantation yields and returns. The 300 Index is a volume productivity index developed for Pinus radiata D.Don that has been widely used within New Zealand to assess site productivity. Although the 300 Index is routinely characterised at ...Read More

Cost benefits for Laser scanned softwood plantations
Operational deployment of LiDAR derived information into softwood resource systems PNC305-1213 Assessing and measuring the growth of plantations is vital if growers are to get the best from the investment in their trees. Previous FWPA research has identified that using aircraft mounted, laser scanning equipment (LiDAR) is an effective way to manage estates; however, incorporating ...Read More

Operational deployment of LiDAR derived information into softwood resource systems
The project evaluated LiDAR based inventory solutions for softwood plantations in terms of information outcomes, technical feasibility and cost effectiveness.  The project demonstrated that imputation models are able to predict many commercially valuable parameters, appear robust and produce predictions that make sense. Since models are central in a model-based inventory system this provides confidence that ...Read More

Operational deployment of LiDAR in Australian softwood plantations
LiDAR (Light Detection And Ranging) can deliver significant practical and economic advantages to those intensively managing pine plantations. The six largest pine plantation management organisations in Australia have formed a collaborative to determine if the deployment of LiDAR can be coordinated, thereby reducing costs and sharing expertise. This report compares the status of LiDAR in ...Read More

Adoption of new airborne technologies for improving efficiencies and accuracy of estimating standing volume and yield modeling in Pinus radiata plantations
Updating forest inventories of P. radiata plantations can be very expensive, with traditional methods costing from $25 to $40 per hectare. However LiDAR (Airborne Laser Scanner) data combined with multi-wavelength digital imagery is predicted to produce accurate estimates of tree height, stem density, basal area, forest volume and biomass at a cost of around $2 ...Read More

Evaluation and Validation of Canopy Laser Radar Systems for Native and Plantation Forest Inventory: Summary Report
Research into using Lidar technologies to characterise forest structure has increased rapidly. However, the use of such technologies to assist commercial forest inventory operations has not yet been addressed. The objectives for this study were to validate and promote the use of airborne and ground based Lidar technologies as tools in forest inventory programs in ...Read More