Applications of Airborne Laser Scanning for the spatial estimation of forest structural parameters in Mediterranean environments

Abstract

The objective of this dissertation is to compare different Airborne Laser Scanning (ALS) data and methods for assessing forest aboveground biomass under Mediterranean environments. The major contribution of this dissertation to the existing literature is the presentation of a remarkable number of case studies providing special considerations to the common problems in the operational use of ALS systems. The main issues concern the potential use for ALS data exploitation in forest inventories on large territories, their use for silvicultural systems detection and for the estimation of fuel load in forest stands. Regarding the estimation part of the work, this dissertation focused on the assessment and the mapping of the aboveground woody biomass. The first approach couples optical remote sensing, ALS (raster Canopy Height Model values) and field survey data and it is formulated as a case study on a poplar-dominated riparian forest in Central Italy. The second approach is an experimental test for investigating the structural variability of Mediterranean fuel models. An analysis of the effectiveness of ALS raw and raster data in the estimation process is performed and two different methodological approaches coupling ALS data processing with field sampling are presented . Experimental results from this analysis highlight the potential of ALS data to provide detailed map of the spatial distribution of forest fuels and the quantification of the structural parameters able to characterize fuel types.