Woody Vegetation [2.07]

This Project will produce tools and procedures to auto-generate landscape level woody vegetation features (ie spatial layers) from field and remote sensing woody vegetation data.

These metrics can be assessed to inform carbon accounting, biodiversity and ecosystem health and fire management.

The tools will be available to organisations for sustainable land management decision making and monitoring, mapping and natural resource management activities.

Initially, the research will  develop key data primitives (eg canopy cover, leaf area index, bole density, the fraction of photosynthetically active radiation), which are then scaled up using multiple remote sensing data sources to characterise and automatically extract features.

Highlights

The Woody Vegetation Project is off to a good start, having selected their three test sites for sampling and stratification and started the baseline testing at each one.

The team is negotiating with a provider of aerial imagery.

There have been four Project meetings to date – one hosted by Department of Environment and Resource Management Queensland; two in Melbourne; and one at the Silvilaser conference in Hobart.

Project 2.07 Overview

Andrew Haywood, DSE Vic

New imaging processes will be developed to describe fundamental properties of forests such as lead-area indices, for  forest management and state of the environment reporting