Airborne lidar scanning for forest biomass estimation

Forests provide ecosystemic services e.g. through sequestration of CO2 and as repositories and generators of biodiversity, as well as economic value through production of wood, and biomass in general. Sustainability of forests management must be monitored through suitable indicators, mapped into GIS. Remote sensing is instrumental in complementing expensive and slow on-site ground surveys, and in spatialization of such data, and data obtained from satellites, airplanes and helicopters have been used for many years. RPAS-based remote sensing has the specific characteristic of yielding very high-definition data, though on relatively limited areas, playing a role that is half way between ground-based and long-distance survey methods. The Department of Information Engineering, Electronics and Telecommunications (DIET) of “La Sapienza” University of Rome, in collaboration with Oben srl, a spin-off enterprise dedicated to drone-based aerial surveys, has been working for several years on innovative techniques for aerial surveys and data processing and interpretation, collaborating with public and private research institutions in forestry, most notably the Universities of Molise and Florence.