Benefits of Using LiDAR for Monitoring?

Land managers and practitioners utilize monitoring activities to document conditions and changes to these conditions, all guiding land management decisions. Monitoring data can be used to evaluate forestry, fuels, ecological change associated with ecological processes or as a result of management activities, and are often extrapolated to evaluate management success or determine the needs of future work. A successful monitoring program collects the data needed to evaluate change in order to make informed management decisions.

Traditional methods of ecological and wildland fuels monitoring often utilize distance measures, line intercepts, or quadrat methods that require significant initial setup and highly trained expertise. As each method is designed to measure a single aspect of an ecological condition, these methods typically have to be used in conjunction with each other or repeated at different scales to monitor aspects of habitat that are of interest such as groundcover vegetation diversity, forest structure, and wildland fuels. Additionally, when using these methods, data collection and entry are vulnerable to error and must include the additional steps of quality assurance and quality control.

Terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) is a remote sensing tool that is uniquely poised to resolve the limitations of traditional monitoring methods by standardizing data collection with a non-bias, repeatable, laser-based approach. This improves efficiency, reduces error, and creates easily analyzed numerical datasets representative of forest conditions. In this approach, a highly-specialized laser range-finder is used to automatically measure the locations of millions of vegetation, surface, or object points around it. The result is an efficient, accurate method for measuring change that can be linked to metrics used by land managers to evaluate quality and guide future management actions.