Using Airborne Laser Scanning Data to Support Forest Sample Surveys

Abstract

Forest surveys, in the form of both stand management and strategic inventories, have a long history of using remotely sensed data to support and enhance their design and estimation processes. By the use of airborne laser scanning data this capacity has emerged as one of its most important and prominent applications. The chapter includes a brief overview of forest inventory uses of remotely sensed data, a section on aspects of ground sampling that can be managed to optimize estimation of relationships between ground and airborne laser scanning (ALS) data, and a section on stand management inventories. The latter section reviews underlying and motivating factors crucial to the primary focus of the chapter, formal statistical inference for ALS-assisted forest inventories. Inferential methods are described for two primary cases, full and partial ALS coverage. Within each case, estimators for both design-based and model-based inference are presented.