Terrestrial laser scanning data Wytham Woods: individual trees and quantitative structure models (QSMs)
Creators
- 1. CAVElab - Computational & Applied Vegetation Ecology, Department of Environment, Ghent University, Belgium
- 2. UCL Department of Geography, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT, UK
- 3. National Physical Laboratory, Climate and Earth Observation Group Hampton Road, Teddington, Middlesex. TW11 0LW, UK
- 4. Environmental Change Institute, School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 3QY, UK
- 5. Mathematics, Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences, Tampere University, Tampere, Finland
Description
This dataset was used for the analysis of the following publication:
Laser scanning reveals potential underestimation of biomass carbon in temperate forest. Calders, K, Verbeeck, V, Burt, A, Origo, N, Nightingale, J, Malhi, Y, Wilkes, P, Raumonen, P, Bunce, R G H and Disney, M. Ecological Solutions and Evidence (accepted)
Any use of this dataset should cite the paper above (Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License).
Contact: kim.calders@ugent.be
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Dataset
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General:
TLS data were collected in leaf-off conditions during late November 2015 - January 2016. Windy days were avoided to ensure data quality. We used a RIEGL VZ-400 terrestrial laser scanner (RIEGL Laser Measurement Systems GmbH). The instrument has a beam divergence of 0.35 mrad and operates in the infrared (wavelength 1550 nm) with a range up to 350 m. The pulse repetition rate for each scan was 300 kHz, the minimum range was 0.5 m and the angular sampling resolution was 0.04°. This resulted in 22,500,000 outgoing pulses for a single scan, resulting in a beam diameter of 2.45 cm and beam spacing of 3.5 cm at 50 m (for example). The azimuth angle range was 0-360° and the zenith angle range was 30-130°. Therefore an additional scan was acquired at each scan location with the scanner tilted at 90° from the vertical to complete sampling of the full hemisphere at each location. Scans were done in a larger 6 ha area using an approximate 20 m × 20 m grid, to ensure the best possible data quality within our 1.4 ha study area. Trees which had at least more than half of their stem at tree diameter 1.3 m inside the boundaries of the study area were included
[ Note that this dataset contains 876 individual trees, but after applying the boundary conditions, 835 trees within the study area were used in the analysis of the paper >> see TLS_Inventory.ipynb]
Full details of the methods to segment individual trees and generate the QSMs can be found in the paper Calders et al. Ecological Solutions and Evidence.
Tree ID:
Tree IDs can have numbers only or numbers + letters. A number only means this was a base with one stem. A number + letter means individual trees (split below 1.3m), that share a common tree base.
Datasets:
1) DATA_clouds_txt & DATA_clouds_ply: Individually segmented trees in *txt and *ply format. File naming is [tree_id].*txt or [tree_ply].*tx
2) DATA_QSM_opt: optimised QSMs using TreeQSM v2.0 (https://github.com/InverseTampere/TreeQSM). File naming is [tree_id]-[dmin0]-[rcov0]-[nmin0]-[dmin]-[rcov]-[nmin]-[lcyl]-[NoGround]-[iteration].mat
3) Raw scan data can be found here: http://dx.doi.org/10.5285/ed9156e1697343e4ad82e83ed550e345
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Paper analysis
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We have provided all scripts (analysis_and_figures) that were used to:
1 ) analyse the data (TLS_Inventory.ipynb):
----- Analysis of point clouds and QSMs using TLS_Inventory.py.ipynb > tls_summary.csv (#876 trees)
----- Link with census &1.4ha > trees_summary.csv (#835 trees)
2) generate the paper figures:
----- various *.R and *.ipynb scripts in the main folder and /allometriesTLS/
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Funding
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The TLS fieldwork was funded through the Metrology for Earth Observation and Climate project (MetEOC-2), grant number ENV55 within the European Metrology Research Programme (EMRP). The EMRP is jointly funded by the EMRP participating countries within EURAMET and the European Union. Funds for purchase of the UCL RIEGL VZ-400 instrument was provided by the UK NERC National Centre for Earth Observation (NCEO) and UCL Geography. The census of the forest plot was supported by an ERC Advanced Investigator Grant to Yadvinder Malhi (GEM-TRAIT, grant number 321131).