Measuring plant structure with terrestrial lidar compared with manual measurement

Abstract

Quantifying leaf area is essential for it is a key variable in global carbon, water and energy flux, atmospheric exchange models, crop yield prediction, and satellite calibration. This research processed and analysed destructive harvesting data and TSL data from Cockle Park and Karawatha Forest to calculate leaf area. This paper demonstrates the effectiveness of destructive experiments by statistical analysis and linear regression. Two TLS-based leaf area estimation methods are compared. Method based on contact frequency verifies the effect of voxel size on LA and gives an optimum size at 0.7 m. Another method based on the hit radius performs sensitivity analysis on several variables.