Applying Individual Tree Structure From Lidar to Address the Sensitivity of Allometric Equations to Small Sample Sizes.

Abstract:

Lidar remote sensing is widely applied for mapping forest carbon stocks, and technological advances have improved our ability to capture structural details from forests, even resolving individual trees. Despite these advancements, the accuracy of forest aboveground biomass models remains limited by the quality of field estimates of biomass. The accuracies of field estimates are inherently dependent on the accuracy of the allometric equations used to relate measurable attributes to biomass. These equations are calibrated with relatively small samples of often spatially clustered trees. This research focuses on one of many issues involving allometric equations - understanding how sensitive allometric parameters are to the sample sizes used to fit them. We capitalize on recent advances in lidar remote sensing to extract individual tree structural information from six high-resolution airborne lidar datasets in the United States. We remotely measure millions of tree heights and crown radii, and fit allometric equations to the relationship between tree height and radius at a ‘population’ level, in each site. We then extract samples from our tree database, and build allometries on these smaller samples of trees, with varying sample sizes. We show that for the allometric relationship between tree height and crown radius, small sample sizes produce biased allometric equations that overestimate height for a given crown radius. We extend this analysis using translations from the literature to address potential implications for biomass, showing that site-level biomass may be greatly overestimated when applying allometric equations developed with the typically small sample sizes used in popular allometric equations for biomass.