Extraction of forest parameters from airborne laser scanner data and multispectral satellite imagery – a standwise approach

Since an increasing amount of provinces in Europe are covered by high resolution laser scanner data, an investigation was carried out to what extent this data can be used for the extraction of forest parameters like tree number, basal area and timber volume. The developed approach was tested at two test sites. Test site Burgau with 500ha, dominated by spruce (picea abies), pine (pinus silvestris) and oak(quercus sp.), was located in the eastern part of Austria whereas a second test site was lo-cated in the northern part of Austria, dominated by spruce fir and beech (fagus sylvatica). Ground truth data was provided by the local forest management and additional field measurements. This informa-tion served as a reference for the estimation of the forest parameters timber volume, tree number, basal area and biomass on stand level based on the vertical forest structure provided by LIDAR data. Results show that at least a separation of coniferous and deciduous forest is required as an additional information for each forest stand to achieve good results. Therefore the usage of high resolution multi-spectral satellite imagery is suggested which will allow a separation of coniferous and deciduous for-est.