Applications in GIS Module 2: Forestry and LiDAR

In this week's module, we explored a LiDAR point cloud of the Green Meadows Area in Shenandoah National PArk, VA. 

In the Local Scene ArcGIS viewer with the LiDAR point cloud added, initially I see a red square over a mountain terrain. Zooming in, I can see a blanket of layered dots with gradient colors ranging from red to blue. With the First-Person Navigation tool, I can toggle around the map and tilt the landscape to a 3-dimensional view. When zoomed out, I can see that the red corner of the LiDAR point cloud is the high ground of a mountain, and the blue corner is the low dip of a valley. 

With the imagery base map on, I can see that this point cloud is in a mountain range and covers the plateau of the mountain top down into the foothills of the mountain range. I can see there is a road on the imagery basemap, and it visibly cuts through the southeast corner of the point cloud with a thin line. There is a neighborhood with roads in the southwest corner of the point cloud.

Zooming in very close to examine the points, I can see a grid of lines where points are thickly layered with a scattering of points between each line. When I zoom into the lower blue portion of the point cloud, I can turn the navigation tool to look up the mountain side. The Lidar points are clustered together to form clearly defined tree tops all the way to the orange top of the mountain.  

The density map (above) is conveying where the densest parts of the forest are. In the map, I can see that the forest is less dense around roads and neighborhoods. The forest is most dense in the mountain valleys. This map would be helpful to foresters because they can clearly see where the thickest parts of the forest are. This map can be used for forest conservation and could help foresters manage the land and identify if any parts of the forest may be dying out, thinning, or flourishing as expected.

The bar graph tells me that the mean vegetation height on the map is 54.43. The bar graph shows that most of the trees are above the mean height at over 58 feet tall. Less than 10,000 trees are smaller than 5.5 feet and larger than 100 feet in height. This could mean that this forest is mature with older trees and some new growth.