A Model-Based Approach for the Recovery of Forest Attributes Using Airborne Laser Scanning Data

As three-dimensional wall-to-wall information on forest structure, ALS echoes provide information on the growing stock and canopy structure. Even though the ALS echo heights are associated with the dimensions of trees, a theoretical model to relate ALS data with interesting forest attributes is missing. The recorded observation of echo height can be viewed as an outcome of a complex process mixing several random sub-processes related to the forest and the atmosphere in a non-trivial way. The forest-related processes include those generating stand density, tree heights, tree locations, tree crown shapes, and the internal structure of tree crowns. This chapter presents our recent work on deve…