Abstract:

Remote sensing technology in measuring quantitatively the vertical and spatial distribution of forest structure draws more and more domestic and foreign scientists attention, and is an important tool to understand the function of forest ecosystems, forest carbon storages and global carbon cycle. The laser radar is superior in detecting the forest vertical structure to other remote sensing data. The purpose of this study was to establish a model to estimate tree height and biomass by processing the GLAS (geoscience laser altimeter system) waveform data, and make the validation, the precisions for the height and biomass estimation were 93.7% and 91.3%, respectively. The result demonstrated that the precision of estimating tree height and biomass was remarkably improved by using LIDAR, comparing with the traditional methods. This study provided important references for researches on mapping the forest vertical parameters.

Key words: lidar, GLAS, tree height, biomass