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Airborne laser scanning and tree crown fragmentation metrics for the assessment of Phytophthora ramorum infected larch forest stands

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journal contribution
posted on 2018-04-06, 12:56 authored by Chloe Barnes, Heiko Balzter, Kirsten Barrett, James Eddy, Sam Milrier, Juan C. Suárez
The invasive phytopathogen Phytophthora ramorum has caused extensive infection of larch forest across areas of the UK, particularly in Southwest England, South Wales and Southwest Scotland. At present, landscape level assessment of the disease in these areas is conducted manually by tree health surveyors during helicopter surveys. Airborne laser scanning (ALS), also known as LiDAR, has previously been applied to the segmentation of larch tree crowns infected by P. ramorum infection and the detection of insect pests in coniferous tree species. This study evaluates metrics from high-density discrete ALS point clouds (24 points/m2) and canopy height models (CHMs) to identify individual trees infected with P. ramorum and to discriminate between four disease severity categories (NI: not infected, 1: light, 2: moderate, 3: heavy). The metrics derived from ALS point clouds include canopy cover, skewness, and bicentiles (B60, B70, B80 and B90) calculated using both a static (1 m) and a variable (50% of tree height) cut-off height. Significant differences are found between all disease severity categories, except in the case of healthy individuals (NI) and those in the early stages of infection (category 1). In addition, fragmentation metrics are shown to identify the increased patchiness and intra-crown height irregularities of CHMs associated with individual trees subject to heavy infection (category 3) of P. ramorum. Classifications using a k-nearest neighbour (k-NN) classifier and ALS point cloud metrics to classify disease presence/absence and severity yielded overall accuracies of 72% and 65% respectively. The results indicate that ALS can be used to identify individual tree crowns subject to moderate and heavy P. ramorum infection in larch forests. This information demonstrates the potential applications of ALS for the development of a targeted phytosanitary approach for the management of P. ramorum.

Funding

The work was funded as part of a NERC CASE studentship (NE/L008068/1) with partner Bluesky International who collected the ALS data for the research.

History

Citation

Forest Ecology and Management, 2017, 404, pp. 294-305 (12)

Author affiliation

/Organisation/COLLEGE OF SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING/School of Geography, Geology and the Environment/GIS and Remote Sensing

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Published in

Forest Ecology and Management

Publisher

Elsevier

issn

0378-1127

Acceptance date

2017-08-31

Copyright date

2017

Available date

2018-04-06

Publisher version

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378112717309362?via=ihub

Language

en