EVALUATION OF SITE QUALITY AND MODELLING TREE PRODUCTIVITY BY LIDAR TECHNOLOGY IN SALT-AFFECTED OAK FOREST TERRITORY

Abstract

Forest site quality evaluation is an important part of forest planning and forest management. A forest site is characterized by forest biomass, which is determined by elevation characteristics, soil type and climate. Height of tree is widely used parameter for terroir typifying, but measuring of tree height is sometimes time- and labour-consuming and could affected by errors. Airborne LiDAR technology is an effective tool for determine fast and accurate the tree height on relative larger area. GIS software environment provides to prepare the high resolution digital elevation model (DEM) and digital surface model (DSM) for pixel-based canopy height. Traditionally, the operational tree height estimation can significant differ from the actual tree heights. In our investigation, between the LiDAR-based elevation parcel map and operational tree height estimation, a close correlation (r=0.7935) was detected. The aim of our research was creating a site qualification map, based on airborne LiDAR data. Tree height map was completed with soil type data. Trees are different age on the plot area, so age-based standardization was carried out by modified Chapman-Richards growth function to examine the increments of trees. In order to evaluate the forest site quality, created increment map was categorized. Based on the results, surface hydrology features are mainly influenced the tree increment, so the dendromass. Nevertheless, significant differences were observed between the tree increments in different soil types; higher salt content resulted smaller (62.49%) trees in Solonetz soil.

Keywords

• Airborne LiDAR
• remote sensing
• digital surface model (DSM)
• digital elevation model (DEM)
• annual increment
• Chapman-Richards growth function
• agroforestry
• salinization
• dendromass