Estimation of the Timber Quality of Scots Pine with Terrestrial Laser Scanning

Forests

Ville Kankare¹  Marianna Joensuu¹  Jari Vauhkonen¹  Markus Holopainen¹  Topi Tanhuanpää¹  Mikko Vastaranta¹  Juha Hyyppä²  Hannu Hyyppä²  Petteri Alho²  Juha Rikala¹ 

[1] Department of Forest Sciences, University of Helsinki, FI-00014 Helsinki, Finland; E-Mails:;Centre of Excellence in Laser Scanning Research, Finnish Geodetic Institute, FI-02431 Masala, Finland

关键词: remote sensing;    forest inventory;    GIS;    forest management planning;    laser scanning;    terrestrial laser scanning;    timber quality;    forest technology;   

DOI  :  10.3390/f5081879

来源: mdpi

【 摘 要 】

Preharvest information on the quality of Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris) timber is required by the forest industry in Nordic countries, due to the strong association between the technical quality and product recovery of this species in particular. The objective of this study was to assess the accuracy of estimating external quality attributes and classifying the quality of mature Scots pine trees by terrestrial laser scanning (TLS). The tree quality was estimated using a random forest approach, based on both field and TLS measurements of stem diameters, tree height and branch heights. The relative root mean squared errors of the TLS measurements for tree height, diameter, diameter at 6 m and the lowest living and dead branch height were 7.1%, 5.9%, 8.9%, 9.6% and 42.9%, respectively. The highest errors of the branch heights were caused by the shadowing effect in the point cloud data. The quality classes were estimated accurately, based on both (field and TLS measured) tree attributes. Trees were classified with 95.0% and 83.6% accuracy into three operationally-important quality classes and with 87.1% and 76.4% accuracy into five classes using, field or TLS measurements, respectively. The obtained quality classification results were promising. The enhanced tree quality information could have a significant effect on planning forest management procedures, wood supply chains and optimizing the flow of raw materials. To fully integrate tree quality measurements in operational forestry, the methods used should be fully automated.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© 2014 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.