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Forest structural complexity tool - an open source, fully-automated tool for measuring forest point clouds

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journal contribution
posted on 2023-05-21, 04:35 authored by Sean Krisanski, Mohammad Sadegh Taskhiri, Gonzalez Aracil, S, Herries, D, Muneri, A, Gurung, MB, James MontgomeryJames Montgomery, Paul TurnerPaul Turner
Forest mensuration remains critical in managing our forests sustainably, however, capturing such measurements remains costly, time-consuming and provides minimal amounts of information such as diameter at breast height (DBH), location, and height. Plot scale remote sensing techniques show great promise in extracting detailed forest measurements rapidly and cheaply, however, they have been held back from large-scale implementation due to the complex and time-consuming workflows required to utilize them. This work is focused on describing and evaluating an approach to create a robust, sensor-agnostic and fully automated forest point cloud measurement tool called the Forest Structural Complexity Tool (FSCT). The performance of FSCT is evaluated using 49 forest plots of terrestrial laser scanned (TLS) point clouds and 7022 destructively sampled manual diameter measurements of the stems. FSCT was able to match 5141 of the reference diameter measurements fully automatically with mean, median and root mean squared errors (RMSE) of 0.032 m, 0.02 m, and 0.103 m respectively. A video demonstration is also provided to qualitatively demonstrate the diversity of point cloud datasets that the tool is capable of measuring. FSCT is provided as open source, with the goal of enabling plot scale remote sensing techniques to replace most structural forest mensuration in research and industry. Future work on this project will seek to make incremental improvements to this methodology to further improve the reliability and accuracy of this tool in most high-resolution forest point clouds.

History

Publication title

Remote Sensing

Volume

13

Issue

22

Article number

4677

Number

4677

Pagination

1-31

ISSN

2072-4292

Department/School

Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies

Publisher

MDPI

Place of publication

Switzerland

Rights statement

Copyright: © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Repository Status

  • Open

Socio-economic Objectives

Rehabilitation or conservation of terrestrial environments; Native forests; Softwood plantations