Airborne laser scanning of forest resources: an overview of research in Italy as a commentary case study
Author(s)
Date Issued
2013
Type
article
Abstract
This article reviews the recent literature concerning airborne laser scanning for forestry purposes in Italy, and presents the current methodologies used to extract forest characteristics from discrete return
ALS (Airborne Laser Scanning) data. Increasing interest in ALS data is currently being shown, especially for remote sensingbased forest inventories in Italy; the driving force for this interest is the possibility
of reducing costs and providing more accurate and efficient estimation of forest characteristics. This
review covers a period of approximately ten years, from the first application of laser scanning for forestry
purposes in 2003 to the present day, and shows that there are numerous ongoing research activities which use these technologies for the assessment of forest attributes (e.g., number of trees, mean tree height, stem volume) and ecological issues (e.g., gap identification, fuel model detection). The basic approaches – such
as single tree detection and areabased
modeling – have been widely examined and commented in order to explore the trend of methods in these technologies, including their applicability and performance.
Finally this paper outlines and comments some of the common problems encountered in operational use of laser scanning in Italy, offering potentially useful guidelines and solutions for other countries with similar conditions, under a rather variable environmental framework comprising Alpine, temperate and Mediterranean forest ecosystems
Additional information
L'articolo è disponibile sul sito dell'editore http://www.journals.elsevier.com/international-journal-of-applied-earth-observation-and-geoinformation/
Citation
Motaghi, A. et al. 2013. Airborne laser scanning of forest resources: An overview of research in Italy as a commentary case study. "International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation" 23: 288–300
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