Rocky Mountain Research Station Publications
RMRS Online Publication - Journal
Articles, External Publications, and Special Reports
Nearest neighbor imputation of species-level,
plot-scale forest structure attributes from LiDAR data
Hudak, Andrew T.; Crookston, Nicholas L.; Evans, Jeffrey S.; Hall, David E.; Falkowski, Michael J. 2008. Nearest neighbor imputation of species-level, plot-scale forest structure attributes from LiDAR data. Remote Sensing of Environment. 112: 2232-2245.
Meaningful relationships between forest structure attributes measured in representative field plots on the ground and remotely sensed data measured comprehensively across the same forested landscape facilitate the production of maps of forest attributes such as basal area (BA) and tree density (TD). Because imputation methods can efficiently predict multiple response variables simultaneously, they may be usefully applied to map several structural attributes at the species-level. We compared several approaches for imputing the response variables BA and TD, aggregated at the plot-scale and species-level, from topographic and canopy structure predictor variables derived from discrete-return airborne LiDAR data. The predictor and response variables were associated using imputation techniques based on normalized and unnormalized Euclidean distance, Mahalanobis distance, Independent Component Analysis (ICA), Canonical Correlation Analysis (aka Most Similar Neighbor, or MSN), Canonical Correspondence Analysis (aka Gradient Nearest Neighbor, or GNN), and Random Forest (RF). To compare and evaluate these approaches, we computed a scaled Root Mean Square Distance (RMSD) between observed and imputed plot-level BA and TD for 11 conifer species sampled in north-central Idaho. We found that RF produced the best results overall, especially after reducing the number of response variables to the most important species in each plot with regard to BA and TD. We concluded that RF was the most robust and flexible among the imputation methods we tested. We also concluded that canopy structure and topographic metrics derived from LiDAR surveys can be very useful for species-level imputation.
Keywords: forestry, k-NN imputation, LiDAR remote sensing, mapping, random forest
About PDFs: For best results, do not open the PDF in your Web browser. Right-click on the PDF link to download the PDF file directly to your computer. Click here for more PDF help.
Download Article
http://www.fs.fed.us/rm/pubs_other/rmrs_2008_hudak_a001.pdf
PDF File Size: 1.7 MB
Title: RMRS Other
Publications: Nearest neighbor imputation of species-level, plot-scale
forest structure attributes from LiDAR data
Electronic Publish Date: September 2, 2008
Last Update: September
2, 2008