Applying a Portable Backpack Lidar to Measure and Locate Trees in a Nature Forest Plot: Accuracy and Error Analyses

Abstract

Accurate tree positioning and measurement of structural parameters are the basis of forest inventory and mapping, which are important for forest biomass calculation and community dynamics analyses. Portable backpack lidar that integrates the simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) technique with a global navigation satellite system receiver has greater flexibility for tree inventory than terrestrial laser scanning, but it has never been used to measure and map forest structure in a large area (>101 hectares) with high tree density. In the present study, we used the LiBackpack DG50 backpack lidar system to obtain the point cloud data of a 10 ha plot of subtropical evergreen broadleaved forest, and applied these data to quantify errors and related factors in the diameter at breast height (DBH) measurements and positioning for more than 1900 individual trees. We found an average error of 4.19 cm in the DBH measurements obtained by lidar, compared with manual field measurements. The incompleteness of the tree stem point clouds was the main factor that caused the DBH measurement errors, and the field DBH measurements and density of the point clouds also had significant impacts. The average tree positioning error was 4.64 m, and it was significantly affected by the distance and route length from the measured trees to the data acquisition start position, whereas it was affected little by the habitat complexity and characteristics of tree stems. The tree positioning measurement error led to increases in the mean value and variability of paired-tree distance error as the sample plot scale increased. We corrected the errors based on the estimates of predictive models. After correction, the DBH measurement error decreased by 31.3%, the tree positioning error decreased by 44.3%, and the paired-tree distance error decreased by 56.3%. As the sample plot scale increased, the accumulated paired-tree distance error stabilized gradually.