Forest Structural Complexity Tool—An Open Source, Fully-Automated Tool for Measuring Forest Point Clouds

Forest mensuration remains critical in managing our forests sustainably, however, capturing such measurements costly, time-consuming and provides minimal amounts of information as diameter at breast height (DBH), location, height. Plot scale remote sensing techniques show great promise extracting detailed forest rapidly cheaply, they have been held back from large-scale implementation due to the complex workflows required utilize them. This work is focused on describing evaluating an approach create a robust, sensor-agnostic fully automated point cloud measurement tool called Structural Complexity Tool (FSCT). The performance FSCT evaluated using 49 plots terrestrial laser scanned (TLS) clouds 7022 destructively sampled manual stems. was able match 5141 reference automatically with mean, median root mean squared errors (RMSE) 0.032 m, 0.02 0.103 m respectively. A video demonstration also provided qualitatively demonstrate diversity datasets that capable measuring. open source, goal enabling plot replace most structural research industry. Future this project will seek make incremental improvements methodology further improve reliability accuracy high-resolution clouds.