Monitoring the understory in eucalyptus plantations using airborne laser scanning

Abstract

In eucalyptus plantations, the presence of understory increases the risk of fires, acts as an obstacle to forest operations, and leads to yield losses due to competition. The objective of this study was to develop an approach to discriminate the presence or absence of understory in eucalyptus plantations based on airborne laser scanning surveys. The bimodal canopy height profile was modeled by two Weibull density functions: one to model the canopy, and other to model the understory. The parameters used as predictor in the logistic model successfully discriminated the presence or absence of understory. The logistic model composed by gcanopy, gunderstory, and gunderstory showed higher values of accuracy (0.96) and kappa (0.92), which means an adequate classification of presence of understory and absence of understory. Weibull parameters could be used as input in the logistic regression to effectively identify the presence and absence of understory in eucalyptus plantation.