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Estimation Of Forest Interior Condition In Southern Appalachian Mountains Using Airborne Lidar Data, Gang Shao, Songlin Fei, Buddhika D. Madurapperuma, Guofan Shao

Purdue GIS Day

Sustainability of forest ecosystem requires maintenance of forest cover and forest interior conditions. Sustaining forest cover supplies ecosystem goods and services and maintains biomass and carbon and nitrogen storage. Forest interior supports ecosystem functioning and provides particular physical and biological environments for plant and animal species that depend on a type of habitat isolated from non-forest land cover areas and prohibit the infestation of invasive species. Land cover maps derived from satellite imagery were broadly applied to assess spatial patterns of forest ecosystem and its dynamic. However, existing land cover maps at landscape scale are insufficient to provide information of …