Fig 1.
Terrestrial based lidar (TLS) scans of tropical forest on a hillslope at La Selva Biological Reserve, Costa Rica.
Top-Color indicates distance from scanner, while saturation indicates laser reflectivity. Distortion of canopy elements near the top of the image is due to cylindrical reprojection of a hemispherical scan. Note that the image here is a 100x downsampling of the original scan, which includes over 40 million (x,y,z) coordinates. Bottom-Higher resolution TLS image focusing on the understory, white indicates closer objects, black indicates more distant returns.
Table 1.
Description of lidar-derived vertical profile metrics.
Table 2.
Synthetic forest parameterization.
Fig 2.
Examples of synthetic forests, with areas representing 1 km2.
Colors indicate height at top of the canopy. Shown here are forests and profiles with mean diameters of 15 cm (left), 30 cm (middle) and 55 cm (right), with the shape parameter of the Weibull distribution varied from 0.8 to 1.2 in increments of 0.1.
Table 3.
Vertical profile derived lidar metrics.
Fig 3.
Observed verses predicted forest biometric properties based on multiple linear regression models using stepwise variable selection.
Table 4.
Forest biometric properties and estimators from lidar metrics.