Mapping forests with Lidar: a review highlighting the California perspective

Kelly, M. and S. Di Tommaso. 2015. Mapping forests with Lidar provides flexible, accurate data with many uses. California Agriculture 69(1): 14-20

The use of remote sensing for forest inventory, fire management, and wildlife habitat conservation planning has a decades-long and productive history, especially in California. The history of forest remote sensing in California follows a transition from aerial photography to digital remote sensing, in which Landsat plays a significant role, and today shows an increasing reliance on Lidar analysis. In California where forests are complex and difficult to accurately map, numerous remote sensing scientists have pioneered development of methodologies for forest mapping with Lidar.  Lidar has been used successfully here in a number of ways: to capture forest structure; to map individual trees in forests and critical wildlife habitat characteristics; to predict forest volume and biomass; to develop inputs for forest fire behavior modeling, and to map forest topography and infrastructure. In commemoration of the centennial of California Forestry, this paper reviews the ways in which Lidar technology – small and large footprint, discrete and waveform data – has been used to map California forests. Journal link.