Earlier News

SilviLaser 2017, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia, October 10-12, 2017

  • A great time was had by all amidst the fall foliage on the eastern edge of the Appalachians. TLS was well represented with talks by Atticus Stovall, Crystal Schaaf, Peter Boucher, Zhan Li, Mat Disney, Phil Radtke, Kim Calders, Jeff Atkins, Harm Bartholomeus, and Alan Strahler. View the program and abstracts in the SilviLaser2017 Proceedings here:

RCN Harvard Forest Calibration Activity

  • In a two-week field campaign in late August, 2017, participants in the TLS Research Coordination Network gathered at Harvard Forest, in Petersham, Massachusetts, USA, to scan three plots with six instruments to measure canopy and tree structure. Joined by research foresters from Michigan State, University of Maine, and Virginia Tech, five individual trees of each of four species in the plots were destructively sampled for detailed structure measurements of weight and volume of wood and leaves by trunk and branch order. Stay tuned for lots of exciting results! For more information, see talks by Strahler and Radtke in the SilviLaser2017 Proceedings (links above).

  New Visualization

  • Want to show some colleagues how TLS scans forests and models trees with QSM? Eric Casella, of the UK Forest Research Agency, has now posted an impressive Youtube video taking you through the steps. Supply your own narration, guided by the captions, and make them true believers!

Earlier Blog News

  • Mat Disney’s Blogspot: Okay, why is Dame Judy Dench featured on Mat’s Blogspot? Turns out, she’s a tree lover and interested in English oaks from ecological and historical viewpoints. Who knew? Mat and his team recently scanned Dame Judy’s favorite oak, an old, open-grown tree in her garden. Visit the blogspot to see the the BBC trailer for a program on Dame Judy’s trees and enjoy the spectacular fly-throughs made from Mat’s data. BBC even shows some cylinders from QSM!
  • Ready for another great video on Quantitative Structure Modeling (QSM)? Here’s a YouTube link for an updated version of Markku Åkerblom’s animation demonstrating how QSM works to capture and measure tree structures. You’ll wish you had a tripod for your lidar like his!

Recent Publications

  • Can quantitative measures of tree structures, taken from QSM reconstructions, classify trees by species? Well, yes! A YouTube video animation, keyed to a new paper in Remote Sensing of Environment by Markku Akerblom and colleagues at Tampere U. of Technology, shows the features that do it and how well they separate birch, pine, and spruce. Watch and listen in HD and stereo, then read the paper.
  • So you’re planning that sample grid for Riegl scanning in your favorite forest stand, and wondering just how fine it needs to be to get the top-of-canopy point density for really good QSMs. A 10-by-10 m grid will be just dandy, according to Phil Wilkes and friends at UCL and beyond, in a new paper in Remote Sensing of Environment. Have a look for some tips and tricks, too, to make the job easier.
  • Tired of scanning those pesky trees in that deep, dark woods? How about measuring  some grass biomass? According to Sam Cooper and co-authors from South Dakota State and UMass Boston in a new Remote Sensing paper, four scans with a Compact Biomass Lidar on the sides of a 1-m square grass plot will do pretty well — better in fact than the conventional method. You could also take 150 digital photos for structure-from-motion processing for a slightly better result, but why?
  • Caves, salt marshes, mangroves, and eroding coastal slopes, not to mention temperate and tropical forests, are all targets for the Compact Biomass Lidar (CBL), as demonstrated in a new paper in Remote Sensing in Ecology and Conservation by Ian Paynter and Crystal Schaaf’s crew at UMass Boston. Have a read to see what this “little lidar that could” can do!
  • Looking for a up-to-date review paper on TLS and ALS? Jan Eitel and friends’ new article in Remote Sensing of Environment focuses on multitemporal and multispectral applications using return intensities as well as point locations. The reference list is worth the trip alone!
  • Tired of worrying about using those stock values for the proportion of woody area (α) in the PAI to estimate the LAI from hemiphotos? Take heart — Will Woodgate and friends have a new method for retrieving α (alpha) from classified imagery or scanner data that works really well. Their new paper in Agricultural and Forest Meteorology provides the details.
  • Lambertian leaves? Think again. A new paper by Sanna Kaasalainen and colleagues at QFo Finland uses their hyperspectral lidar to show that leaves do, in fact, have a strong specular component to lidar reflectance. And, the specularity is wavelength dependent — so spectral indexes or even spectral ratios are angle-dependent, too. Hmmm….