Forest species and biomass estimation using airborne laser scanning and hyperspectral images

Remote sensing can be considered a key instrument for studies related to forests and their dynamics. At present, the increasing availability of multisensor acquisitions over the same areas offers the possibility to combine data from different sensors. In this study high resolution airborne hyperspectral and ALS data at 0.4m resolution were acquired during summer 2012 in a complex forest ecosystem in the Alps, characterized by different tree species and difficult morphology. Using tree crown polygons from ALS and classification map from hyperspectral images, a species-specific tree canopy map was obtained. Then, height distribution of dominant tree species in three habitat strata were analyzed. Our initial experiments show the potential of the mix-sensors approach for further forest biophysical parameters estimation which is a vital part of forest inventory