Means, Joseph E.; Acker, Steven A.; Harding, David J.; Blair, J. Bryan; Lefsky, Michael A.; Cohen, Warren B.; Harmon, Mark E.; McKee, W. Arthur. 1999. Use of large-footprint scanning airborne lidar to estimate forest stand characteristics in the western Cascades of Oregon. Remote Sensing of Environment. 67: 298-308.
A scanning lidar, a relatively new type of sensor which explicitly measures canopy height, was used to measurestructure of conifer forests in the Pacific Northwest.SLICER (Scanning Lidar Imager of Canopies by Echo Re-covery), an airborne pulsed laser developed by NASAwhich scans a swath of five 10-m diameter footprints alongthe aircraft's flightpath, captures the power of the re-flected laser pulse as a function of height from the top ofthe canopy to the ground. Ground measurements of for-est stand structure were collected on 26 plots with coinci-dent SLICER data. Height, basal area, total biomass, andleaf biomass as estimated from field data could be pre-dicted from SLICER-derived metrics with r2 values of0.95, 0.96, 0.96, and 0.84, respectively. These relation-ships were strong up to a height of 52 m, basal area of132 nit/ha and total biomass of 1300 Mg/ha. In light ofthese strong relationships, large-footprint, airborne scan-ning lidar shows promise for characterizing stand struc-ture for management and research purposes.