Martin Buchauer (recipient of three LASmoons)
Cartography & Geomedia Technology
University of Applied Science Munich, GERMANY
Background:
Salt marsh areas provide numerous services such as natural flood defenses, carbon sequestration, agricultural services, and are a valuable coastal habitat for flora, fauna and humans. However, they are not only threatened by the constant rise of sea levels caused by global warming but also by human settlement in coastal areas. A sensible local coastal development is important as it may help to support the development and progression of stressed salt marshes.
Goal:
This research aims to visualize and extract vegetation metrics as well as the temporal analysis of four salt marsh data sets which are derived from terrestrial laser scanning. Located at the South and North shore of the Eden Estuary near St Andrews, Scotland, the scans were acquired in the summer and winter of 2016. Ground based laser scanning is an ideal method of fully reconstructing vegetation structures as well as having the ability to retrieve meaningful metrics such as height, area, and vegetation density. Although this technology has frequently been applied in the area of forestry, its application to salt marsh areas has not yet fully explored.
Data:
+ TLS data acquired with a Leica HDS6100 (average density of 38000 points/m²)
+ ground control points (field data)
LAStools processing:
1) check the quality of the LiDAR data [lasinfo, lasoverlap, lasgrid]
2) merge and retile the original data with buffers [lastile]
3) classify point clouds into ground and non-ground [lasthin, lasground]
4) create digital terrain (DTM) and digital surface models (DSM) [lasthin, las2dem, blast2dem]