Pasture Trials

It's been a while... Coming soon, the team at CSIRO are about to do some field pasture trials at their CSIRO Chiswick site. The trials will collect a range of data including TLS, Rover Ultrasound and Radar as well as digital RGB imagery. Exciting times ahead!

Laser Scanning at Tumbarumba - DWEL, Riegl VZ-400, CBL and Zebedee

Recently a team from CSIRO traveled to the TERN Flux and Supersite at Tumbarumba in NSW to complete a week of laser scanning with DWEL, a Riegl VZ-400, a Compact Biomass Lidar (CBL) and two handheld Zebedee units.

 

Figure 1. The Tumba laser scan team, from left to right, Steve Zegelin, Mark Kitchen, Will Woodgate, Eva van Gorsel, Tom Jovanovic, Mick Schaefer and Debbie Crawford.

The Tumbarumba site is located in the Bago State forest in south eastern New South Wales. The forest is classified as wet sclerophyll, the dominant species is Eucalyptus delegatensis, and average tree height is 40 m. Elevation of the site is 1200 m and mean annual precipitation is 1000 mm. 

The mission at Tumbarumba was to scan and completely characterise the core 1 ha TERN Supersite plot. This involved collecting approximately 35 Riegl scans, 150 CBL scans, 18 DWEL scans and combining around 24 scans from the two Zebedee units. At each of the Riegl scan locations, digital hemispheric photographs were also collected.

While on-site, we also collected a few hi-res Riegl Scans from a unique angle, the top of the 70 m Flux Tower! This was a herculean effort from Will and Mark to climb to the top of the tower with the laser scanner in tow, but we think that the scan data will be well worth the effort. Care was taken while at the top of the tower to scan in the footprint of the towers' hyperspectral imaging system so that we can merge the laser scan data with that of the hyperspectral imagery, this will make a very interesting data set indeed!

Figure 2. Mark and the Riegl VZ-400 perched securely at the top of the tower, and the view out over the tree canopies.

Recent publications

1) Who knew? A five-parameter model for calibrating the Dual Waveform Echidna Lidar? That’s what it took to cover the range from 1 m and beyond, thanks to telescopic effects that decrease the signal from midrange (10-12 m) toward the instrument and Lambert’s Law, which decreases the signal from midrange to far range. See the fit in a new Sensors article by Zhan Li et al.

And even though it's not really a DWEL article...

2) Road trip! Attaching a SICK lidar and an active optical sensor to their 4-wheel drive SUV, Michael Schaefer and Dave Lamb recently cruised through a tall fescue pasture, mapping biomass from height and NDVI. You can read how they did it in their recent article in Remote Sensing.

And there are plenty more DWEL related publications over at the TLSIIG website. Thanks to Alan for these neat article intros!

Himalayans in the Mist

A little bit of eye candy to start the week off on a good note!

This is an image produced from a scan taken a while ago at the Arboretum here in Canberra. The image is produced from the intensity information recorded from the 1556nm laser.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year everyone! All the best for 2016.

We have been a bit quiet on here in the past few months but we have a big 2016 planned so stay tuned...

DWEL & Zebedee at Canberra Arboretum - Part 2

Last week the bad weather finally cleared so we headed back out to the National Arboretum Canberra to collect scans a year on from the start of a collaborative project between CSIRO and the Australian National University. The project uses DWEL and Zebedee (a CSIRO handheld laser scanner) to monitor the growth, plant morphology, and health of some of the 94 small 'forests' that are planted in the arboretum. Preliminary views of the data show that several species of trees within the Arboretum have grown significantly over the year, in some cases up to 2.00m taller as well as the canopy filling out. We will now conduct scientific analysis and validation on selected trees within each of the scanned forests.

Online Visualization of your Lidar Point Clouds

I recently came across this website (Sketchfab) that allows you to upload your point clouds and visualize them online (like in this blog). You may have already seen it before, but if not I thought I would put it out there, there is only one catch, in the free account you can only upload files less than 50MB in size.
I will be using it from now on to post sample DWEL scans. Click the viewer below to see how it works!

C_Kara005_1064nm by mick.schaefer13 on Sketchfab