Kyoto, Japan -- Forests have been benefitting humanity since long before the health benefits of forest bathing were discovered. They are major carbon sinks that provide a wide range of ecosystem services, including timber and non-timber forest products, recreation, and climate regulation.
Accurately assessing forest biomass is essential for understanding carbon storage and supporting sustainable forest management, but forests are vast three-dimensional structures and therefore difficult to study. Until recently, even measuring the height of a single tree was a challenging task, let alone understanding the size of its canopy. Conventional ground-based tree surveys are labor-intensive and often difficult to conduct in remote or steep terrain, limiting their use in large-scale assessments. This has also restricted researchers' ability to develop accurate biomass estimation formulae.
However, new drone-based technologies such as LiDAR, or Light Detection and Ranging, are becoming increasingly accessible to researchers and have enabled more efficient measurement of tree structures and forest biomass. Emitting hundreds of thousands to millions of laser beams per second, LiDAR obtains three-dimensional information about the objects it scans.
