In most habitats, vegetation provides the main structure of the environment. This complexity can facilitate biodiversity and ecosystem services. Therefore, measures of vegetation structure can serve as indicators in ecosystem management. However, many structural measures are laborious and require expert knowledge. Here, we used consistent and convenient measures to assess vegetation structure o...

In biodiversity experiments based on seeded experimental communities, species richness and species composition exert a strong influence on canopy structure and can lead to an improved use of aboveground resources. In this study, we want to explore whether these findings are applicable to agriculturally managed permanent grassland. Vertical layered profiles of biomass, leaf area (LA) and light i...

Conventional discrete return airborne lidar systems, used in the commercial sector for efficient generation of high quality spatial data, have been considered for the past decade to be an ideal choice for various mapping applications. Unlike two-dimensional aerial imagery, the elevation component of airborne lidar data provides the ability to represent vertical structure details with very high ...

Vegetation spatial structure including plant height, biomass, vertical and horizontal heterogeneity, is an important factor influencing the exchanges of matter and energy between landscape and atmosphere, and the biodiversity of ecosystems. Regional and global forest biomass and forest structure estimation is essential for understanding and monitoring ecosystem responses to human activities and...

In this paper we describe an approach to classify forested areas based on their vertical vegetation structure using Airborne Laser Scanning (ALS) data. Surface and terrain roughness are essential input parameters for modeling of natural hazards such as avalanches and floods whereas it is basically assumed that flow velocities decrease with increasing roughness. Seeing roughness as a multi-scale...

Researches have shown that 3D vegetation structure exerts a strong influence on radiation transmission and changes radiation and energy balance at the land surface. Vegetation spatial structure including plant height, biomass, vertical and horizontal heterogeneity, is an important factor influencing the exchanges of matter and energy between the landscape and atmosphere, and the biodiversity of...

The movements of organisms and the resultant flows of ecosystem services are strongly shaped by landscape connectivity. Studies of urban ecosystems have relied on two-dimensional (2D) measures of greenspace structure to calculate connectivity. It is now possible to explore three-dimensional (3D) connectivity in urban vegetation using waveform lidar technology that measures the full 3D structure...

Canopy structure, the vertical distribution of canopy material, is an important element of forest ecosystem dynamics and habitat preference. Although vertical stratification, or “canopy layering,” is a basic characterization of canopy structure for research and forest management, it is difficult to quantify at landscape scales. In this paper we describe canopy structure and develop methodologie...

Plant communities display a vertical structure based on the size and growth pattern of the dominant species. To a large extent, this pattern, called vertical stratification, depends on the climatic zone. Vertical structure analysis consists in detecting the number of layers and their limits within a forest stand. So far, there is a lack of robust approaches applied to airborne laser scanning (A...