Quantifying vegetation and canopy structural complexity from terrestrial LiDARdata using theforestr rpackage

Abstract

AbstractTerrestrial LiDAR(light detection and ranging) technologies have created new means of quantifying forest canopy structure, allowing not only the estimation of biomass, but also descriptions of the position and variability in canopy elements in space. Such measures provide novel structural information broadly useful to ecologists.There is a growing need for both a detailed taxonomy of forest canopy structural complexity (CSC) and open, transparent, and flexible tools to quantify complexity in ways that will advance foundational ecological knowledge of structure‐function relationships.TheCSCtaxonomy we present groups structural descriptors into five categories: leaf area and density, canopy height, canopy arrangement, canopy openness, and canopy variability. This paper also introduces therpackageforestr, the first open‐sourcerpackage for the calculation ofCSCmetrics from terrestrial LiDARdata.Therpackageforestris an analysis toolbox that works with portable canopy LiDAR(PCL) data and other pixelated/voxelized point clouds derived from terrestrial LiDARscanning (TLS) data to calculateCSCmetrics of interest to ecologists, modellers, forest managers, and remote sensing scientists.