Error assessment and mitigation for hyper-temporal UAV-borne LiDAR surveys of forest inventory

The use of LiDAR remote sensing has become an important tool in the management of modern forest inventories (Hyyppa et al. 2008). However, the cost and intermittent nature of LiDAR surveys have restricted the use of this technology in monitoring the high frequency changes occuring within forests. The use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) as a remote sensing platform has become a rapidly developing area in the field of monitoring environmental change. Recent studies by Jaakkola et al.(2010) and Lin et al.(2011) describe initial tests of a UAV system for forest monitoring and measurement showing the potential of this technology for this purpose. This study further investigates this potential by examining the achievable accuracy of a newly developed LiDAR UAV system in comparison to a traditional full scale system. We found that equivalent accuracy is achievable from this UAV platform if the flying height is restricted and careful consideration is given to the processing of the data.