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

CBL up North

Recently a team of researchers from CSIRO traveled up to Northern QLD for a grassland biomass monitoring and satellite radar validation project. The field sites were located on the Spyglass Beef Research Facility a cattle property of approximately 100,000 hectares in size which is to be used as one of the pilot sites for the GEOGLAM-RAAP project.

Mapping out where to go next

We carried out many measurements including, soil moisture, point intercept, CBL (compact biomass lidar), destructive biomass sampling, field spectroscopy, tree structural measurements and ground cover.

Starting up the CBL for another scan.

It was very dry on the property, so more often than not the field sites didn't have much ground biomass at all, however it was a good exercise in establishing a baseline to work from and also the field protocols that we will use in the future.

Very dry and sparse vegetation courtesy being enduring 4 years of drought

Spy01 by mick.schaefer13 on Sketchfab

CSIRO OzDWEL Promo Video

This video made an appearance a at the GFOI-GOFC Biomass Meeting in Brisbane this week. So with some gentle encouraging from the TLSIIG members at the meeting I thought I would post it up here too.
The video was filmed to "promote the science" that CSIRO is currently using and was aimed at primary school aged children for education purposes. It is currently being shown at the 3D cinema in the CSIRO Discovery Center.

Thanks to the CSIRO Comms team for putting this video together.