Search results for "forest inventory"
showing 10 items of 23 documents
Linking woodland key habitat inventory and forest inventory data to prioritize districts needing conservation efforts
2012
Woodland key habitat (WKH) inventories have been conducted in northern European countries, with the aim to create networks of minimally disturbed forest stands for protection. The goal of national forest inventory is to provide information relevant to forest management, such as on forest types, trees species composition, age structure and wood volume. The aim of this study was to link these two inventory databases to identify districts of Latvia most deficient in connectivity and habitat quality, in order to prioritize districts needing conservation effort. As an example, the area of deciduous forest with nemoral tree species (oak, ash, lime, maple and elm) and aspen was chosen. These fores…
Simplified methods for spatial sampling: application to first-phase data of Italian National Forest Inventory (INFC) in Sicily
2006
Abstract: Methodological approaches able to integrate data from sample plots with cartographic processes are widely applied. Based on mathematic-statistical techniques, the spatial analysis allows the exploration and spatialization of geographic data. Starting from the punctual information on land use types obtained from the dataset of the first phase of the ongoing new Italian NFI (INFC), a spatialization of land cover classes was carried out using the Inverse Distance Weighting (IDW) method. In order to validate the obtained results, an overlay with other vectorial land use data was carried out. In particular, the overlay compared data at different scales, evaluating differences in terms …
Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) operated spectral camera system for forest and agriculture applications
2011
VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland has developed a Fabry-Perot Interferometer (FPI) based hyperspectral imager compatible with the light weight UAV platforms. The concept of the hyperspectral imager has been published in the SPIE Proc. 7474 and 7668. In forest and agriculture applications the recording of multispectral images at a few wavelength bands is in most cases adequate. The possibility to calculate a digital elevation model of the forest area and crop fields provides means to estimate the biomass and perform forest inventory. The full UAS multispectral imaging system will consist of a high resolution false color imager and a FPI based hyperspectral imager which can be used at …
Estimation of winter leaf area index and sky view fraction for snow modelling in boreal coniferous forests: consequences on snow mass and energy bala…
2012
Abstract in Undetermined Leaf area index (LAI) and canopy coverage are important parameters when modelling snow process in coniferous forests, controlling interception and transmitting radiation. Estimates of LAI and sky view factor show large variability depending on the estimation method used, and it is not clear how this is reflected in the calculated snow processes beneath the canopy. In this study, the winter LAI and sky view fraction were estimated using different optical and biomass-based approximations in several boreal coniferous forest stands in Fennoscandia with different stand density, age and site latitude. The biomass-based estimate of LAI derived from forest inventory data wa…
Simultaneous optimization of harvest schedule and data quality
2015
In many recent studies, the value of forest inventory information in harvest scheduling has been examined. In a previous paper, we demonstrated that making measurement decisions for stands for which the harvest decision is uncertain simultaneously with the harvest decisions may be highly profitable. In that study, the quality of additional measurements was not a decision variable, and the only options were between making no measurements or measuring perfect information. In this study, we introduce data quality into the decision problem, i.e., the decisionmaker can select between making imperfect or perfect measurements. The imperfect information is obtained with a specific scenario tree fo…
Automatic recognition of tree species from 3D point clouds of forest plots
2014
The objective of the thesis is the automatic recognition of tree species from Terrestrial LiDAR data. This information is essential for forest inventory. As an answer, we propose different recognition methods based on the 3D geometric texture of the bark.These methods use the following processing steps: a preprocessing step, a segmentation step, a feature extraction step and a final classification step. They are based on the 3D data or on depth images built from 3D point clouds of tree trunks using a reference surface.We have investigated and tested several segmentation approaches on depth images representing the geometric texture of the bark. These approaches have the disadvantages of over…
Determining the appropriate timing of the next forest inventory: incorporating forest owner risk preferences and the uncertainty of forest data quali…
2017
Key message The timing to conduct new forest inventories should be based on the requirements of the decision maker. Importance should be placed on the objectives of the decision maker and his/her risk preferences related to those objectives. Context The appropriate use of pertinent and available information is paramount in any decision-making process. Within forestry, a new forest inventory is typically conducted prior to creating a forest management plan. The acquisition of new forest inventory data is justified by the simple statement of “good decisions require good data.” Aims By integrating potential risk preferences, we examine the specific needs to collect new forest information. Meth…
Region-based segmentation on depth images from a 3D reference surface for tree species recognition.
2013
International audience; The aim of the work presented in this paper is to develop a method for the automatic identification of tree species using Terrestrial Light Detection and Ranging (T-LiDAR) data. The approach that we propose analyses depth images built from 3D point clouds corresponding to a 30 cm segment of the tree trunk in order to extract characteristic shape features used for classifying the different tree species using the Random Forest classifier. We will present the method used to transform the 3D point cloud to a depth image and the region based segmentation method used to segment the depth images before shape features are computed on the segmented images. Our approach has be…
Towards automated and operational forest inventories with T-Lidar
2011
International audience; Forest inventory automation has become a major issue in forestry. The complexity of the segmentation of 3D point cloud is due to mutual occlusion between trees, other vegetation, or branches. That is why, the applications done until now are limited to the estimation of the DBH (Diameter at Breast Height), the tree height and density estimation. Furthermore other parameters could also be detected, such as volume or species of trees (Reulke and Haala) . . . This paper presents an effective approach for automatic detection, isolation of trees and DBH estimation. Tree isolation is achieved using an innovative approach based on a clustering methodology followed by a skele…
Anthropogenic Influences in Land Use/Land Cover Changes in Mediterranean Forest Landscapes in Sicily
2016
This paper analyzes and quantifies the land use/land cover changes of the main forest and semi-natural landscape types in Sicily between 1955 and 2012. We analyzed seven representative forest and shrubland landscapes in Sicily. These study areas were chosen for their importance in the Sicilian forest panorama. We carried out a diachronic survey on historical and current aerial photos; all the aerial images used to survey the land use/land cover changes were digitalized and georeferenced in the UTM WGS84 system. In order to classify land use, the Regional Forest Inventory 2010 legend was adopted for the more recent images, and the CORINE Land Cover III level used for the older, lower resolut…