Alen Berta (recipient of three LASmoons)
Department of Terrestrial Ecosystems and Landscape, Faculty of Forestry
University of Zagreb and Oikon Ltd Institute for Applied Ecology, CROATIA
Background:
After becoming the EU member state, Croatia is obliged to fulfill the obligation risen from the Kyoto protocol: National Inventory Report (NIR) of the Green House Gasses according to UNFCCC. One of the most important things during the creation of the NIR is to know how many forested areas there are and their wood stock and increment. This is needed to calculate the size of the existing carbon pool and its potential for sequestration. Since in Croatia, according to legislative, it is not mandatory to calculate the wood stock and yield of the degraded forest areas (shrubbery and thickets) during the creation of the usual forest management plans, this data is missing. So far, only a rough approximation of the wood stock and increment is used during the creation of NIR. However, these areas are expanding every year due to depopulation of the rural areas and the cessation of traditional farming.
Goal:
This study will focus on two things: (1) Developing regression models for biomass volume estimation in continental shrubberies and thickets based on airborne LiDAR data. To correlate LiDAR data with biomass volume, over 70 field plots with a radius of 12 meters have been established in more than 550 ha of the hilly and lowland shrubberies in Central Croatia and all trees and shrubberies above 1 cm Diameter at Breast Height (DBH) were recorded with information about tree species, DBH and height. Precise locations of the field plots are measured with survey GNNS and biomass is calculated with parameters from literature. For regression modeling, various statistics from the point clouds matching the field plots will be used (i.e. height percentiles, standard deviation, skewness, kurtosis, …). 2) Testing the developed models for different laser pulse densities to find out if there is a significant deviation from results if the LiDAR point cloud is thinner. This will be helpful for planning of the later scanning for the change detection (increment or degradation).
Data:
+ 641 square km of discrete returns LiDAR data around the City of Zagreb, the capitol of Croatia (but since it is highly populated area, only the outskirts of the area will be used)
+ raw geo-referenced LAS files with up to 3 returns and an average last return point density of 1 pts/m².
LAStools processing:
1) extract area of interest [lasclip or las2las]
2) create differently dense versions (for goal no. 2) [lasthin]
3) remove isolated noise points [lasnoise]
4) classify point clouds into ground and non-ground [lasground]
5) create a Digital Terrain Model (DTM) [las2dem]
6) compute height of points above the ground [lasheight]
7) classify point clouds into vegetation and other [lasclassify]
8) normalize height of the vegetation points [lasheight]
9) extract the areas of the field plots [lasclip]
10) compute various metrics for each plot [lascanopy]
11) convert LAZ to TXT for regression modeling in R [las2txt]