CHARACTERIZING EVEN AND UNEVEN-AGED SOUTHERN PINE FOREST USING TERRESTRIAL LASER SCANNING

Terrestrial Laser Scanning (TLS) has been used on forest inventories as an alternative to conventional in-field measurements given how effectively it can collect data. However, not enough emphasis has been given on using these sensors to describe different pine forests in the South. We aimed to analyze the effectiveness of TLS in characterizing even- and uneven-aged forest stands. After the data collection with the TLS, we developed a framework based on open-source tools in R for computing individual tree-level metrics (e.g. diameter at breast height (DBH), height, and leaf area index (LAI)). The TLS system showed great potential in capturing the differences between forest stands across those two silvicultural systems. The diameter class distributions of the even- and uneven-aged stands followed bell-shaped and J-distributions, respectively. This study demonstrates TLS as a powerful asset for obtaining forest inventory metrics with a reduced need for field data collection.