Forestry

Forestry, as an industry, is critical to countries all over the world as an important renewable resource. As such, forests need to be carefully monitored and maintained to ensure that their sustainability, overall health, and economic benefits continue to flourish.

Utilizing unmanned, airborne, or terrestrial RIEGL LiDAR systems, resulting in the creation of high density point clouds, is ideal for a variety of forestry applications such as continuous crop monitoring during growth periods, observation of irregularities in plant growth, detection of hail damage, analysis of terrain changes, analysis of variation in forest growth and performance, yield estimation, observation of nutrient over- or undersupply, identification of high-value wood products, reduction of negative environmental impacts, prediction of accurate forest metrics, and long term regular observation of growth characteristics for geological evaluation and classification, amongst others.

Excellent vegetation penetration rate from RIEGL LIDAR scanners result in a high number of ground returns that can be used to generate detailed terrain models.

All points classified as vegetation can be colored by relative height above ground. This yields for a relative estimation model of the trees revealing regions of low and high vegetation stands. Growth rates can be documented by comparison of height models collected over a period of time.

The technique of laser scanning enables the user to capture data suitable for the generation of Digital Surface Models (DSM) and Digital Terrain Models (DTM).

Advanced processing algorithms account for a full exploitation of the information included in the scan data. A typical target situation is measuring areas covered by vegetation. Several target echoes resulting from a single laser pulse emission are obtained by echo digitization and subsequently resolved by online waveform processing, resulting in measurement ranges, echo amplitudes, calibrated target reflectance, and pulse shape information.

Crop growth and health are closely monitored in precision farming in order to minimize the use of fertilizers or irrigation. Airborne laser scanning data enables the user to observe plant growth- while at the same time displaying changes in ground surface- or to detect areas of irregularities.

While plant height cannot, per se, be interpreted as a direct factor for yield calculation, irregularities due to different soil composure, variety of seed type or damage (e.g., weather-related caused by storm, hail, or rainfall) can easily be discerned and taken as an indicator for further developments and estimation of yield at harvest.

Constant monitoring of agricultural areas enables early yield estimation based upon differences in plant growth development.

Article

https://rieglusa.wordpress.com/2016/09/20/customer-spotlight-leading-edge-geomatics/

Please note that “references to any specific commercial products, processes or services or the use of any trade, firm or corporation name are for the information and convenience of the reader and do not constitute endorsement, recommendation or favoring by the US government or National Aeronautics and Space Administration”.

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