An operational UAV-based approach for stand-level assessment of soil disturbance after forest harvesting

Abstract

The effectiveness of generating virtual transects on unmanned aerial vehicle-derived orthomosaics was evaluated in estimating the extent of soil disturbance by severity class. Combinations of 4 transect lengths (5-50 m) and five sampling intensities (1-20 transects per ha) were used in assessing traffic intensity and the severity of soil disturbance on six post-harvest, cut-to-length (CTL) clearfell sites. In total, 15% of the 33 ha studied showed some trace of vehicle traffic. Of this, 63% of was categorized as light (no visible surface disturbance). Traffic intensity varied from 787 to 1256 m ha −1 , with a weighted mean of 956 m ha −1 , approximately twice the geometrical minimum achievable with CTL technology under perfect conditions. An overall weighted mean of 4.7% of the total site area was compromised by severe rutting. A high sampling intensity, increasing with decreasing incidence of soil disturbance, is required if mean estimation error is to be kept below 20%. The paper presents a methodology that can be generally applied in forest management or in similar land-use evaluations.

Forestry Remote Sensing from Unmanned Aerial Vehicles: A Review Focusing on the Data, Processing and Potentialities

“…Considering studies related to soil disturbance assessment, Talbot et al [159] presented an UAV-based approach for soil disturbance assessment after forest harvesting operations. For this purpose, a multi-rotor UAV equipped with an RGB sensor was used to perform flights in six different sites after forest harvesting, using a cut-to-length system.…”

“…Apart from forest applications with more incidence towards tree development and its status, other applications in forestry contexts were explored using UAVs for: forest canopy assessment (canopy cover [125], canopy gaps [152][153][154], LAI [7,155], foliage clumping [7] and leaf angle distribution [156]), regeneration of forests [126,127,157,158], assessment of soil disturbances in post-harvest areas [159][160][161], monitoring of logging operations [162] and tree-stump detection [163]. Most of the studies rely in the use of RGB sensors mounted on rotary-wing UAVs (apart from the multispectral sensor used in [155]), except for canopy gaps [152][153][154] in which a fixed-wing UAVs were used.…”

Soil deformation and its recovery in logging trails of drained boreal peatlands

“…Typically logging trails may cover 4 % -23.5 % of the area of thinned stands (Bettinger et al 1994;Eliasson 2005;Frey et al 2009;Han et al 2009;Cudzik et al 2017;Talbot et al 2018). This impacted area is a distinctively different environment from the intact peat when considering water regime and aeration, rainfall input, microtopography, vegetation and peat structure; all these potentially influence the biogeochemistry of the site.…”

Tree-Stump Detection, Segmentation, Classification, and Measurement Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Imagery

“…UAVs, in combination with photogrammetric methods, have been successfully used for assessing forested areas for pre- [2] and post-harvest assessment [3][4][5][6][7]. In post-harvest assessment, [3,5,8] explored the possibilities of using UAV-borne photogrammetric three-dimensional (3D) data for quantifying soil disturbance from forest machinery. When compared to ground-based solutions [9], UAVs that are equipped with imaging sensors represent a more efficient tool to acquire highly detailed and spatially continuous 3D data.…”