Structural Changes in Boreal Forests Can Be Quantified Using Terrestrial Laser Scanning

Yrttimaa, Tuomas; Luoma, Ville; Saarinen, Ninni; Kankare, Ville; Junttila, Samuli; Holopainen, Markus; Hyyppä, Juha; Vastaranta, Mikko

doi:10.20944/preprints202007.0154.v1

Cited by 11 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 29 publications

(43 reference statements)

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“…How that structure came to be, what is the current status of the tree and how the tree will evolve with time are all questions that cannot be answered accurately based on a single structural snapshot of an individual tree. Therefore, to create context, the next logical step is to reconstruct several of these snapshots over a longer period of time and combine them with concurrent structural snapshots of the entire stand surrounding the tree, in order to detect dynamic and interactive changes in the development of the whole tree community ( Campos et al , 2020 ; Yrttimaa et al , 2020 a ).…”

Section: Standard For the Future?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Terrestrial laser scanning: a new standard of forest measuring and modelling?

Åkerblom

Kaitaniemi

2021

Annals of Botany

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Background Laser scanning technology has opened new horizons for the research of forest dynamics, because it provides a largely automated and non-destructive method to rapidly capture the structure of individual trees and entire forest stands at multiple spatial scales. The structural data itself or in combination with additional remotely sensed data also provides information on the local physiological state of structures within trees. The capacity of new methods is facilitated by the ongoing development of automated processing tools that are designed to capture information from the point cloud data provided by the remote measurements. Scope Terrestrial laser scanning (TLS), performed from the ground or from unmanned aerial vehicles, in particular, has potential to become a unifying measurement standard for forest research questions, because the equipment are flexible to use in the field and have the capacity to capture structural information at the branch-level detail in forest-plot or even forest scale. This issue of Annals of Botany includes selected papers that exemplify the current and potential uses of TLS for purposes such as crown interactions between trees, growth dynamics of mixed stands, non-destructive characterization of urban trees, and enhancement of ecological and evolutionary models. The papers also present current challenges in the applicability of TLS methods and report recent developments in methods facilitating the use of TLS data for research purposes, including automatic processing chains and quantifying branch and above-ground biomass. In this article, we provide an overview of the current and anticipated future capacity of TLS and related methods in solving questions that utilize measurements and models of forests. Conclusions Due to its measurement speed, TLS provides a method to effortlessly capture large amounts of detailed structural forest information, and consequent proxy data for tree and forest processes, in a far wider spatial scale than is feasible with manual measurements. Issues with measurement precision and occlusion of laser beams before they reach their target structures continue to reduce the accuracy of TLS data, but the limitations are counterweighted by the measurement speed that enables large samples. The currently high time-cost of analysing TLS data, in turn, is likely to become diminished through progress in the automated processing methods. The developments point towards TLS becoming a new and widely accessible standard tool in forest measurement and modelling.

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Section: Standard For the Future?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Terrestrial laser scanning: a new standard of forest measuring and modelling?

Åkerblom

Kaitaniemi

2021

Annals of Botany

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Applicability and Analysis of the Results of Non-Contact Methods in Determining the Vertical Displacements of Timber Beams

et al. 2021

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Determining the displacements and consequent deformations of structures is a demanding branch of engineering. Displacements are most often determined by geodetic methods, among which high-precision non-contact methods have recently taken the lead. Engineering geodesy is an indispensable part of construction projects. In the desire for efficient and fast measurements, the technology of terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) and the use of robotic total station (RTS) and other geodetic methods are becoming more and more useful for engineers. In the presented study, we focused on the measurement and comparison of vertical displacements with various mentioned equipment and the determination of the influence of meteorological conditions on the displacements of timber beams that we used to perform the experiment. Measurements were performed both in the laboratory and outdoors. A novelty in the work was the use of a TLS scanner to determine the evaluation of small value displacements and the analysis of the usability of geodetic measuring equipment. In the Materials and Methods section, we describe the equipment used and the characteristics of the beams. The Results section describes the experimental outcomes, which include the performance of experimental analysis of vertical displacements of timber beams under different meteorological conditions. Altogether, the results consist of geodetic measurements and the processing of measured data. The results of measurements of vertical displacements with a terrestrial laser scanner were compared with the results obtained with a robotic total station were evaluated and compared with the displacements calculated from static analysis and the results of other methods used.

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Accuracy Assessment of Total Stem Volume Using Close-Range Sensing: Advances in Precision Forestry

Panagiotidis

Abdollahnejad

2021

Forests

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Accurate collection of dendrometric information is essential for improving decision confidence and supporting potential advances in forest management planning (FMP). Total stem volume is an important forest inventory parameter that requires high accuracy. Terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) has emerged as one of the most promising tools for automatically measuring total stem height and diameter at breast height (DBH) with very high detail. This study compares the accuracy of different methods for extracting the total stem height and DBH to estimate total stem volume from TLS data. Our results show that estimates of stem volume using the random sample consensus (RANSAC) and convex hull and HTSP methods are more accurate (bias = 0.004 for RANSAC and bias = 0.009 for convex hull and HTSP) than those using the circle fitting method (bias = 0.046). Furthermore, the RANSAC method had the best performance with the lowest bias and the highest percentage of accuracy (78.89%). The results of this study provide insight into the performance and accuracy of the tested methods for tree-level stem volume estimation, and allow for the further development of improved methods for point-cloud-based data collection with the goal of supporting potential advances in precision forestry.

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Structural Changes in Boreal Forests Can Be Quantified Using Terrestrial Laser Scanning

Cited by 11 publications

References 29 publications

Terrestrial laser scanning: a new standard of forest measuring and modelling?

Terrestrial laser scanning: a new standard of forest measuring and modelling?

Applicability and Analysis of the Results of Non-Contact Methods in Determining the Vertical Displacements of Timber Beams

Accuracy Assessment of Total Stem Volume Using Close-Range Sensing: Advances in Precision Forestry

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