Projects in forestry and civil engineering depend on accurate information, which is often acquired through remote sensing techniques. One of the remote sensing technologies that has gained importance in the last decade is light detection and ranging (lidar), which describes the surveyed area with 3D points, presented as point clouds....
The public concern for clearcutting in the United States in the 1970s pushed for changes in the natural resources policies. A facet of forest management that came under scrutiny was forest aesthetics. Therefore, the aim of this study is to assess the impact of harvest designs on stand aesthetics using...
The portability and reduced price of unmanned aerial systems (UAS) in recent years has led to a broad range of new UAS-enabled scientific inquiries, including for forestry. Small, consumer-grade UAS are advantageous for forest measurements due to their portability, ease and safety of deployment, and notably, they are currently the...
Western juniper is a native species in eastern Oregon that became invasive during the last century since its range increased fivefold from 1936 to 1988. Western juniper’s ability to absorb rainfall and groundwater has deleterious effects on stream flow and sensitive sage grouse habitat in eastern Oregon. New methods of...
Natural resources are essential to humanity. With the increase in global development in recent decades, people must monitor the state of the environment, whose disturbance has a more significant impact on society than before. However, conventional environmental monitoring is challenged in highly dynamic ecosystems and large areas. As a solution,...
Data acquisition is the foundation of sound decision making. Therefore, after the work of the empiricist who laid the philosophical foundation of the data driven inference (Berkeley, 2003; Hume, 1902; Locke, 1860), significant efforts were carried in developing methods aiming at acquiring representative information for describing reality. The main instrument...
As it was conceptualized, the manual is aligned with other field manual that are currently in use by different universities, such as Mississippi State University, Stephen F Austin, or University of British Columbia. The present manual is the first unified version of Louisiana Tech University of a Field Manual to...
Remote sensing forest inventory gained increased attention in the last decade triggered by the decrease in the price of sensors and the explosion of data availability and formats. Evermore, the constant advances in the hardware processing the data emphasized the necessity to develop algorithms to extract forest relevant information from...
Surface Canopy Water (SCW) is the intercepted rain water that resides within the tree canopy and plays a significant role in the hydrological cycle. Challenges arise in measuring SCW in remote areas using traditional ground based techniques. Remote sensing in the radio spectrum has the potential to overcome the challenges...
Remote sensing techniques have been applied extensively in geospatial investigations, but their use in measuring soil physical attributes has been far less explored. Soil particle size distributions (PSD) are indispensable in modeling pedological and hydrological processes as well as biodiversity. However, estimation of PSD via gravimetric measurement methods, the standard...