Assessment of Potential Forest Biomass Resource on the Basis of Data of Air Laser Scanning

Exact determination of quantity and quality of a forest cover is important for management of natural resources, assessment of a potential forest biomass resource, the ecological analysis and hydrological modeling. The quantity of the developed methods and their implementation is very broad. In this paper, the comparative analysis of the following methods of the automated determination of quantity on the basis of data of air laser scanning is carried out: Microstation (Terrasolid) method; the method using Global mapper + LIDAR module; the method based on combination of data of LIDAR and the raster image; the method using the MATLAB application program package; the methods realized in GIS ArcGIS, and the author's method on the basis of raster of density (Kernel Density) with the use of statistical calculations is also offered.