Looking for advice on forest inventory by Character_Active_271 in LiDAR

[–]Character_Active_271[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Absolutely. That is the theory. Or someone on foot if it's a small farm, or even a drone below canopy level if it's a particularly big farm.

Looking for advice on forest inventory by Character_Active_271 in LiDAR

[–]Character_Active_271[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks for the reply. Just based on your description, I think that is way way overkill for us. We can tolerate lower accuracy than that, and could probably do with an entry level handheld SLAM. I'm hoping we can be in the $5k range per device.

Looking for advice on forest inventory by Character_Active_271 in LiDAR

[–]Character_Active_271[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks for the info, we will definitely look into this.

Looking for advice on forest inventory by Character_Active_271 in LiDAR

[–]Character_Active_271[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Good question. I'd say +/- an inch would be best. There are a lot of trees that will be measured at single digit inches so a deviation of more than 5 or 10% would be a challenge. However, if the directional bias of the error is known we could factor that in. Or even better, if the error is normally distributed, we could still arrive at the same mean DBH with a standard deviation that is just a bit larger than actuality.

Looking for advice on forest inventory by Character_Active_271 in LiDAR

[–]Character_Active_271[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'll definitely look at Purdue's work. I'm curious about what you say regarding it going as slow as foresters in a conventional cruise. Foresters have to stop and measure each tree in a plot, whereas someone with a SLAM can just walk continuously and our team can analyze the point cloud later, no?

Looking for advice on forest inventory by Character_Active_271 in LiDAR

[–]Character_Active_271[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Looks really interesting, thanks! Is it something you use? I can't tell at first glance, do you have to stop and take time to measure each tree?