| Estimating timber volume from a field perspective, with field plots occasionally falling within remote and inaccessible areas, can be a costly and timely endeavor. Remote sensing, with its ability to record information at both the local and regional scale, offers an alternative to traditional field based measurements.;Studies have shown that remotely sensed vegetation biomass indices (e.g. NDVI) derived from mid-spatial resolution digital imagery (e.g. Landsat TM, 30-meters), after being corrected for atmospheric effects, topographical differences and shadow, were highly correlated with timber volume. With the recent advent of high spatial resolution digital imagery from the IKONOS and QuickBird satellites providing more textural information about a forest canopy, with spatial resolutions of 4 meters and 2.44 meters for multispectral data respectively, the opportunity to assess forest volume from a distance at a much finer scale has increased. Additionally Lidar (light detection and ranging) is a relatively new remote sensing technology that can accurately estimate the 3-dimensional structure of forest vegetation which is related to forest volume and offers an alternative to ground based measurement of remotely sensed multispectral data. |
