Engineering Commons^™

Assessment Of Unmanned Aerial Systems And Lidar For The Utility Vegetation Management Of Electrical Distribution Rights-Of-Ways, Matthew R. Walker

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

Utility Vegetation Management (UVM) is often the largest maintenance expense for many utilities. However, with advances in Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS; or more commonly, “drones”) and lidar technologies, vegetation managers may be able to more rapidly and accurately identify vegetation threats to critical infrastructures. The goal of this study was to assess the utility of Geodetics’ UAS-lidar system for vegetation threat assessment for 1.6 km of a distribution electric circuit. We investigated factors which contribute to accurate tree crown detection and segmentation of trees from within an UAS-lidar derived point cloud, and the factors which contribute to accurate tree risk …

Assessing The Limitations And Capabilities Of Lidar And Landsat 8 To Estimate The Aboveground Vegetation Biomass And Cover In A Rangeland Ecosystem Using A Machine Learning Algorithm, Shital Dhakal

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Remote sensing based quantification of semiarid rangeland vegetation provides the large scale observations required for monitoring native plant distribution, estimating fuel loads, modeling climate and hydrological dynamics, and measuring carbon storage. Fine scale 3-dimensional vertical structural information from airborne lidar and improved signal to noise ratio and radiometric resolution of recent satellite imagery provide opportunities for refined measurements of vegetation structure.

In this study, we leverage a large number of time series Landsat 8 vegetation indices and lidar point cloud - based vegetation metrics with ground validation for scaling aboveground shrub and herb biomass and cover from small scale plot …