Characterizing Canopy Structure Information on Savanna Woodland Using Small-footprint Airborne Lidar Data

Modeling the carbon dynamics in a savanna ecosystem is a very challenging task due to its horizontal and vertical heterogeneity and it usually requires complex 3-D biogeochemical model. In turn, the application of 3D biogeochemical model at the landscape level requires detailed canopy structure information on individual trees, which is an impossible task until the recent advent of new remotely sensed data and information extraction technqiues. This study explores the utility of airborne small-footprint airborne Lidar (Light Detection and Ranging) to isolate individual trees and extract their heights, crown diameters, crown heights, and LAI. These parameters will be feed into a 3D model called MAESTRO to quantify carbon flux and will be validated with eddy covariance measurements.