Abstract
Diameter distribution is essential for calculating stem volume and timber assortments of forest stands. A new method was proposed in this study to improve the estimation of stem volume and timber assortments, by means of combining the Area-based approach (ABA) and individual tree detection (ITD), the two main approaches to deriving forest attributes from airborne laser scanning (ALS) data. Two methods, replacement, and histogram matching were employed to calibrate ABA-derived diameter distributions with ITD-derived diameter estimates at plot level. The results showed that more accurate estimates were obtained when calibrations were applied. In view of the highest accuracy between ABA and ITD, calibrated diameter distributions decreased its relative RMSE of the estimated entire growing stock, saw log and pulpwood fractions by 2.81%, 3.05% and 7.73% points at best, respectively. Calibration improved pulpwood fraction significantly, which contributed to the negligible bias of the estimated entire growing stock.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 65-75 |
| Number of pages | 11 |
| Journal | ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing |
| Volume | 93 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jul 2014 |
| Externally published | Yes |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This study is funded by the Spearhead project of the University of Eastern Finland : Multi-scale geospatial analysis of forest ecosystems, and the Finnish Cultural Foundation central fund. We also thank Dr. Jari Vauhkonen for the discussion on the ITD data processing, Dr. Lauri Korhonen and Dr. Petteri Packaléns for improving the readability of the DBH prediction section.
Keywords
- Accuracy
- Calibration
- Combination
- Estimation
- Forestry
- Laser scanning