#woodlands — Public Fediverse posts

Resolving Issues Of Space And Time For Ecological Applications Of Airborne Lidar | Long-Term Recovery Of Canopy 3D Structural Diversity Following Wildfires In The World’s Largest Temperate Woodland
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https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2025.2853 <-- shared paper
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https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2025.1095 <-- shared paper
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H/T @evan Hockridge | HMEI Environmental Fellow at Princeton University | Landscape Ecologist | Geospatial and Remote Sensing technologist | Conservation scientist
“LiDAR has come a long way.
Over the past several decades, improvements in sensors, platforms, and processing have steadily eroded many of the traditional barriers to using LiDAR in ecology, conservation, and the natural sciences. High-resolution datasets can now be collected at spatial scales and costs that would have been difficult to imagine even a decade ago.
Fine-scale vegetation structure can be resolved at exceptional point densities, increasingly subtle topographic features can be mapped beneath vegetation, and advances in sensor range and miniaturization mean that enormous landscapes can now be surveyed at high resolution from fixed-wing aircraft and UAS.
Across the spectrum, from spaceborne LiDAR to terrestrial and mobile laser scanning, common and method specific advances continue to redefine what is resolvable.
But as many of these old limitations recede, the frontier is shifting.
Increasingly, the challenge for ecological LiDAR is not just space, but time…
LiDAR provides an extraordinary snapshot of ecosystem structure, but understanding ecological dynamics requires connecting those snapshots through time. [The authors] discuss several ways forward: well-designed space-for-time substitutions, strategically repeated LiDAR surveys, integration across LiDAR platforms and sensors, fusion with longer-running remote-sensing products, and collaborative datasets that make measurements increasingly comparable across places and years.
In other words, the tremendous gains we have made in spatial extent and resolution can increasingly be leveraged to overcome limitations in temporal extent.
As LiDAR continues to become more accessible, extensive, and repeatable, the opportunity is no longer simply to map ecosystems in finer detail. It is to understand how their three-dimensional structure developed, why it is changing, and where it may be headed in the changing world…”
#chronosequence #spacefortimesubstitution #GIS #spatial #mapping #remotesensing #ecosystem #structure #dynamics #spatialecology #ecology #conservation #climatechange #topography #elevation #UAS #airborne #spatialanalysis #spatiotemporal #landscape #multisensor #LiDAR #Australia #WA #WesternAustralia #vegetation #woodlands