Short Description
RIEGL VZ-600i terrestrial laser scanner for 3D data acquisition of forest environments. The raw product of laser scanning is a high-resolution three-dimensional point cloud of the scanned surface or object, from which individual tree and stand parameters (e.g. height, diameter, volume, biomass) can be automatically derived and analyzed using suitable software programs.
Contact Person
Eugenio Diaz-Pines
Research Services
Interested researchers and/or institutions, kindly contact Eugenio Diaz-Pines for further information
Methods & Expertise for Research Infrastructure
The Riegl VZ-600i replaces traditional forestry measuring devices (e.g. caliper, relascope) for forest inventory and monitoring applications. Using computer programs already developed at the BOKU Institute of Forest Growth and those that are continuously being further developed, the large amounts of 3D data are processed fully automatically and the relevant tree and stand parameters are extracted. For this purpose, the position coordinates of all trees are first determined, and then the trunk diameters and heights of the trees are measured. With new computer algorithms, even the individual 3D points can be clearly assigned to different tree individuals using segmentation algorithms. This means that parameters such as the crown morphology of individual trees can also be collected.
An overview of the methods developed at BOKU for digital forest monitoring with TLS can be found at https://forschung.boku.ac.at/de/department/H914