Karen's blog post on our recent lidar paper

Karen Anderson has written a really nice blog post on our recent paper "A comparison of LiDAR approaches for vegetation and landscape characterization" (published in the open access Remote Sensing in Ecology and Conservation journal). Karen's blog "Weighing up the benefits and costs of waveform LiDAR", and hosted on the ZSL blog site, outlines some of the benefits of waveform lidar for ecology. Our work shows how waveform lidar can provide habitat measurements that just aren't available any other way. Karen concludes that the next few years are likely to see an explosion in applications of waveform lidar in spatial ecology.

An image from Karen's blog showing our TLS work in suburban Luton (taken from: http://www.zsl.org/sites/default/files/styles/wysiwyg/public/media/2016-05/Figure%203.png?itok=ckeELLou)

First results from Ankasa

Andy's been busy processing the Ghana data. First cut from this is a flythrough - low res at the moment but you can see the tower at the start, and the topography towards the end. This was ..... a challenge shall we say.

Andy's also pulled out the 17 largest trees in the ESA AfriSCAT RADAR footprint - and the poibt cluds, and the resultiung models, are shown below. Our initial estimate is that there's around 150 t C in these 17 trees, probably close to half of the total for the whole plot!

Point clouds of 17 largest trees in the plot, extracted automatically from the co-registered full point cloud. Colours are just to differentiate each tree (same below).

Initial results from fitting cylinder models to point clouds. Mostly looking good, and the volume estimates seem robust from the parameter variation.

More tree models to follow!