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L. Eysn, M. Hollaus:
"Delineation of forested areas and estimation of stem volume by means of Airborne Laser Scanning";
Talk: Riegl Lidar 2013, Wien; 2013-06-25 - 2013-06-27.

The usage of forest parameters deduced from airborne laser scanning (ALS) has become a standard for many forestry applications. The 3D-information of forested areas provides a good input for estimating forest parameters.
A fundamental application is delineating forests according to a forest definition, which commonly includes height, crown cover, width and area. A manual delineation based on e.g. orthophotos is dependent on the interpreterīs experience. Furthermore, loosely stocked forests are challenging because the parameter is hardly assessable in a reproducible way. Therefore an automatically method is proposed. Rasterized ALS data are used to detect trees, estimate crowns and connect tree-triples. Finally the forest definitionīs criterions are checked.
Another common forestry parameter is the stem volume within a forested area. Common stem volume estimation methods are based on plot-wise forest inventory (FI) data. The estimates for each sample plot are spatially limited. To assess stem volume area wide, an ALS based methodology is proposed. FI and ALS data are used to automatically calibrate a semi-empirical regression model. The calibrated model and rasterized ALS data are used to derive stem volume maps for entire districts.
The presented workflows are applied to different areas in Vorarlberg, Austria. The derived results are presented and discussed.