Dr. Nicholas Coops provides an introduction to LiDAR for forestry and natural resource management. Terrain elevation was the original intent but our capacity to interpret vegetation heights has moved it from research to operational work quite quickly. Lasers are at the core of the LiDAR technology. Right now it is based on aircraft equipped with LiDAR equipment, flying over the landscape we want information about and recording the returned energy coming back from vegetation and the ground, all at different heights from the airplane. He describes in detail, the technology of the LiDAR survey and how the airplane flight and density of laser pulses give different types of LiDAR data.
Filtering of the pulses is required to get a digital elevation model (DEM). LiDAR is point information compared to pixel Information from Landsat. Different GIS techniques are used to interpret the DEMs. From the Digital Terrain Models (DTMs), slope, vegetation class can be interpreted and checked against the DEMs to predict error. He illustrates with some examples how more data and more ground data results in better terrain maps. He describes in detail the four different types of LiDAR: profiling (the early days), (scanning LiDAR) small footprint, large-footprint and ground -based LiDAR. Individual tree scale and plot scale LiDAR are offering forest managers powerful tools to predict biomass production and ecological attributes.
Dr. Nicholas Coops is Canada Research Chair in Remote Sensing, Department of Forest Resource Management, University of British Columbia. His presentation was part of the Wet Areas Mapping Workshop, Calgary, Alberta on Feb. 11, 2013.
