Measuring individual tree crown diameter with lidar and assessing its influence on estimating forest volume and biomass

Abstract The main objective of this study was to develop reliable processing and analysis techniques to facilitate the use of small-footprint lidar data for estimating tree crown diameter by measuring individual trees identifiable on the three-dimensional lidar surface. In addition, the study explored the importance of the lidar-derived crown diameter for estimating tree volume and biomass. The lidar dataset was acquired over deciduous, coniferous, and mixed stands of varying age classes and settings typical of the southeastern United States. For identifying individual trees, lidar processing techniques used data fusion with multispectral optical data and local filtering with both square and circular windows…