Technical Note: Multispectral lidar time series of pine canopy chlorophyll content

Abstract

We present an empirical application of multispectral laser scanning for monitoring the seasonal and spatial changes in pine chlorophyll (a + b) content and upscaling the accurate leaf-level chlorophyll measurements into branch and tree level. The results show the capability of the new instrument for monitoring the changes in the shape and physiology of tree canopy: the spectral indices retrieved from the multispectral point cloud agree with laboratory measurements of the chlorophyll a and b content. The approach opens new prospects for replacing destructive and labour-intensive manual sampling with remote observations of tree physiology.