Forestry and LiDAR

This week we learned about the uses and applications of LiDAR in a forestry setting.  LiDAR, short for "light detection and ranging," is used in forestry to get information on the forest canopy and underlying domain which is useful in many aspects of forest management.

The LiDAR data itself and the metadata came from the Virginia LiDAR application.  It then had to be extracted using ESRI's LAS Optimizer.  Importing this into an ArcGIS Pro scene displays the LiDAR data where it can be further manipulated.

From the LiDAR data a DEM was created by first setting the appearance filter to ground and then using the LAS Dataset to Raster tool.  A DSM was created with the same tool but by setting the filter to non-ground points.

To calculate the height of the trees I used the minus tool with the inputs as the DSM and the DEM.  This produced some points that were under zero in height.  This occurred mostly in areas where there were roadways.

To calculate biomass density I used the LAS to MultiPoint tool to generate ground and vegetation layers.  These files are then converted to raster using the Point to Raster tool.  Then I used the Is Null tool to make a binary file where all values that are not null get a value of 1 on both the ground and vegetation layers.  Then, I used the plus tool to combine both of these layers together.  This layer was then converted from integer via the Float tool.  Lastly, the biomass density is generated using the Divide tool.

To supplement the data, I generated a chart from the height layer that was made earlier.  This shows a bar graph of the height of the trees.  I created two maps to display the results from this analysis.

The vegetation density as well as the height with map and chart.

The LiDAR map of the region and the corresponding DEM.