New England Enhanced Forest Inventory

Light detection and ranging (LiDAR) has become a common tool for generating remotely sensed forest inventories. However, regional modeling of forest attributes using LiDAR has remained challenging due to varying parameters between LiDAR datasets, such as pulse density. Here we develop a regional model using a three dimensional convolutional neural network (CNN). We then apply our model to publicly available data over New England, generating maps of fourteen forest attributes at a 10 m resolution over 85 % of the region. Attributes include aboveground biomass (kg), total biomass (kg), tree count (#), percent conifer (%), basal area (m^2), mean height (m), quadratic mean diameter (cm), percent spruce/fir (%), percent white pine (%), inner bark volume (m^3), merchantable volume (m^3), and spruce/fir volume (m^3. All values correspond to the amount per pixel cell (I.E. kg of biomass found within that pixel). Map/model performance was assessed using the USFS’s FIA inventory, which constituted an independent dataset free from spatial autocorrelation. More data can be found in the following pre-print: Ayrey, E., Hayes, D. J., Kilbride, J. B., Fraver, S., Kershaw, J. A., Cook, B. D., & Weiskittel, A. R. (2019). Synthesizing Disparate LiDAR and Satellite Datasets through Deep Learning to Generate Wall-to-Wall Regional Forest Inventories. bioRxiv, 580514.