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Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The Influence Of Tree Height On Lidar’S Ability To Accurately Characterize Forest Structure And Spatial Pattern Across Reference Landscapes, Haley L. Wiggins
The Influence Of Tree Height On Lidar’S Ability To Accurately Characterize Forest Structure And Spatial Pattern Across Reference Landscapes, Haley L. Wiggins
Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers
Successful restoration of degraded forest landscapes requires reference models that adequately capture structural heterogeneity at multiple spatial scales. Field-based methods for assessing variation in forest structure are costly and inherently suffer from limited replication and spatial coverage. LiDAR is a more cost-effective approach for generating landscape-scale data, but it has a limited ability to detect understory trees. Increased understanding of appropriate height cut-offs for trees to be reliably included in LiDAR-based analysis could improve applications of LiDAR to assessments of landscape-scale forest structure. Toward that end, I investigated the effect of varying tree-height criterion (minimum height cutoffs of 6, 9, …