News
UAV LiDAR Data of Tropical Forests in Australia
During the first three weeks of September 2018, our colleague Harm Bartholomeus has participated with our LiDAR UAV in a large field campaign in Australia. The objective of the project is to capture data to create “virtual forests” with a high level of detail by using terrestrial laser scanning (TLS), realizing that we are limited from exploring the ecological uncertainties that happen at larger scale by the relatively small coverage of TLS. The combined, bottom-up TLS and top-down UAV LiDAR data is expected to improve biomass estimates and knowledge on how we can upscale plot-based measurements to landscape level.
3D-FOREST, a three-year project funded by the Belgian Federal Science Policy Office led by Dr. Kim Calders and Prof. Hans Verbeeck from Ghent University, partnering with Dr. Harm Bartholomeus and Prof. Martin Herold from Wageningen University, aims at providing novel lidar in-situ 3D forest structure and biomass estimates to validate large-scale air/spaceborne biomass products. Co-incident LiDAR data from different platforms was collected to quantify aboveground biomass and forest structure in five tropical sites in Australia during a two-month fieldwork campaign in the dry season.
More information can be found in the following background article: https://lidarnews.com/articles/novel-lidar-data-tropical-forests/
The LiDAR UAV employed in this campaign is the Riegl Ricopter which is part of the WUR Shared Facilities: https://www.wur.nl/en/product/Unmanned-Aerial-Vehicle-for-Laser-Scanning-LiDAR-UAV.htm