Airborne laser sensing: forest structure and composition.

 

Virgin late seral conifer stand in Hoh Rainforest, WA (Source: Author)

In early 2012, after an IT project wrapped up in New York, I traveled to the Olympic Peninsula by public transport with a backpack and went flyfishing for steelhead. I had done fairly extensive (and labor intensive) forest surveys early in my career, but had never seen the intensity level of agroforestry that I encountered on the Sol Duc River. The microclimate changed with the forest patterns I walked through, and the disturbance regime was anthropogenic: it clearly maintained a series of soil development disruptions, monocultures and single age classes with little or no above ground standing or down dead biomass. 

 

Timber operations in Sol Duc Watershed, WA (Source: Author)

 

Clearcut in Sol Duc Watershed, WA (Source: Author)

I also knew from my work that these disturbance patterns persisted across the forest landscape and likely impacted biogeochemical as well as biodiversity services.

 

Clearcuts on temperate conifer forest landscape. (Source: Sierra Forest Alliance)

New remote sensing technology had also been improved upon that would allow both structural and composition analysis over a large extent, if a model could be developed to process the data using accepted metrics (or analysis statistics).

 

Three-dimensional "point-cloud" data rendered in a software application, delineates a conifer forest stucture (Source: UC Merced)

 

Seral analysis will be modeled based on stand characterizations that are generally accepted in forest ecology.

 

An abstract diagram showing forest succession over time. Increase in biomass, biodiversity and soil thickness are also shown, as well as the fluctuation of different plant communities over the process of succession. (Source: Lucas Martin Frey)