Occlusion Probability in Operational Forest Inventory Field Sampling with ForeStereo

Abstract

Field data in forest inventories are increasingly obtained using proximal sensing technologies, often under fixed-point sampling. Under fixed-point sampling some trees are not detected due to instrument bias and occlusions, hence involving an underestimation of the number of trees per hectare (N). The aim here is to evaluate various approaches to correct tree occlusions and instrument bias estimates calculated with data from ForeStereo (proximal sensor based on stereoscopic hemispherical images) under a fixed-point sampling strategy. Distance-sampling and the new hemispherical photogrammetric correction (HPC), which combines image segmentation-based correction for instrument bias with a novel approach for estimating the proportion of shadowed sampling area in stereoscopic hemispherical images, best estimated N and basal area (BA). Distance-sampling slightly overestimated N (11% bias, 0.60 Pearson coefficient with the reference measures) and BA (4%, 0.82). HPC provided less biased N estimates (-6%, 0.61) but underestimated BA (-8%, 0.83). HPC most accurately retrieved the diameter distribution.