Use of large-footprint scanning airborne lidar to estimate forest stand characteristics in the Western Cascades of Oregon

A scanning lidar, a relatively one type of sensor which explicitly measures canopy height, was used to measure structure of conifer forests in the Pac ific Northwest. SLICER (Scanning Lidar Imager of Canopies by Echo Recovery) , an airborne pulsed laser developed by NASA which scans a swath of five 10 -m diameter footprints along the aircraft's flightpath, captures the power of the reflected laser pulse as a function of height from the top of thr: c anopy to the ground. Ground measurements of forest stand structure were col lected oz 26 plots with coincident SLICER data. Height, basal area, total b iomass, and leaf biomass as estimated from field data could be predicted fr om SLICER-derived metrics with r(2) values of 0.95, 0.96, 0.96, and 0.84, r espectively. These relationships were strong zip to a height of 52 m, basal area of 132 m(2)/ha and total biomass of 1300 Mg/ha. In light of these str ong relationships, large-footprint, airborne scanning lidar shows promise f or characterizing stand structure for management and research purposes. (C) Elsevier Science Inc., 1999.