Wall-to-Wall canopy metrics from Airborne Laser Scanning data using open-source tools
Instructor: Dr. Jeff Atkins, Dr. Inacio Bueno This workshop provides a hands-on introduction to generating wall-to-wall canopy structural metrics from Airborne Laser Scanning (ALS) data using open-source R tools. Participants will learn the ecological and statistical foundations of LiDARderived canopy metrics, as well as practical skills for processing. las point clouds into usable products. The training covers cloud quality checks, normalization, terrain and canopy modeling, metric derivation, and spatial interpolation to create continuous raster-based representations of forest structure. Through lectures, coding demonstrations, and guided exercises, attendees will gain the expertise to compute, analyze, and visualize canopy metrics and apply them to ecological questions such as biomass estimation, forest type classification, and disturbance assessment. More details here.
