Applications Week 2: Forestry and LiDAR

In this lab, we made maps of forest height and density for an area of Shenandoah National Park from a LAS point cloud collected using LiDAR. We created both a DEM with the LiDAR detected ground points and a DSM with the non-ground points, then subtracted the DEM from the DSM to get the height of the trees. I enjoyed getting to convert points to rasters and examining these rasters close up, since I don't think we've worked much with rasters yet. The Minus, Plus, and Is Null tools were all new to me too and really demonstrate the power of rasters!


The most challenging part of this lab was trying to get the LiDAR scene to show up properly in my layout. It would never load all four quadrants of the points from the LAS cloud. After hours of adjusting the zoom and map frame extent and playing with settings, I was finally able to get this layout, although it isn't as polished as I'd like.


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