Integrating data from discrete return airborne lidar and optical sensors to enhance the accuracy of forest description: A review

Abstract

Good forest management requires comprehensive and reliable inventory data spanning large areas. Forest management has increasingly relied on remote sensing, specifically light detection and ranging (LiDAR). However, due to the high costs associated with data collection and processing, wall-to-wall LiDAR data is rarely obtained for forests. In contrast, multispectral imagery from optical sensors often covers large extents but they fail to capture detail below the forest canopy and do not directly measure structural attributes. To take advantage of the complementary benefits of different sensors, active LiDAR and passive optical sensors have been combined and applied to problem-solving in a forestry context for over a decade. A review of the literature shows that fusion of different sensors has resulted in superior performance relative to individual sensors for classifying and delineating forest areas (up to 20% accuracy improvement), identifying species (up to 21% accuracy improvement), and estimating forest volume and biomass (up to 55% accuracy improvement). In contrast, sensor fusion achieved only minor improvements for tree or forest height estimation (1–7% accuracy improvement); this is likely because LiDAR alone is already so effective. This review was unable to draw conclusions on the performance of sensor fusion for forest age and productivity assessment due to the limited number of studies. The lack of results in these areas presents an opportunity for future research. The literature clearly demonstrates the utility of integrating LiDAR and optical data for many aspects of forest description. Perhaps the greatest challenge moving forward will be to operationalise the research such that forestry companies and governments can take advantage of the benefits of data fusion.