In recent years, unoccupied aircraft systems (UAS) have become increasingly affordable and straightforward to incorporate in monitoring applications of forested ecosystems. This shift has facilitated interest in using these tools to monitor aspects of forest ecosystems including vegetation health, forest structure and composition, and potential habitat provided by these systems....
Ground-based assessments of foliar diseases including leaf blight are time-consuming and costly. We investigated the potential for using an unmanned aerial system (UAS) in conjunction with a multispectral sensor to determine whether we could more efficiently and reliably detect and quantify leaf blight in Pacific madrones. Our methods included ground-based...
Forests should be monitored and measured frequently to ensure its sustainability and continuity of carbon sequestration. However, conventional monitoring methods are costly and labor intensive. New technologies, such as unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) can be used as an alternative method to monitor and measure forests. The objective of this study...
The global positioning system (GPS) has come into widespread use for many forestry applications. However, there is still some uncertainty as to how receivers perform in dense forest, where trees interfere with the GPS signal and increase error. These two manuscripts examine GPS accuracy and overall effectiveness within second growth...
Airborne Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) has become a popular remote sensing technology to create digital terrain models and provide forest inventory information. However, little research has been done to investigate the accuracy of using airborne LiDAR to perform measurement tasks common to Forest Engineering. This thesis contains two manuscripts...
Recently concerns over anthropogenic carbon pollution have received increased global attention and research in forest biomass and carbon sequestration has gained momentum. Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) remote sensing has in the last decade demonstrated forest measurement and biomass estimation potential. The project objective was to compare LiDAR forest biomass...