LiDAR Principles, Processing and Applications in Forest Ecology - Chapter 13 - Applications of LiDAR in Biodiversity Conservation, Ecohydrology, and Ecological Process Modeling of Forest Ecosystems

In addition to extracting topographical information, structural traits, and functional traits from forest ecosystems, light detection and ranging (LiDAR) can be used in forest biodiversity and ecohydrology studies and ecological modeling with the extracted structural and functional traits. In this chapter, we first introduce the application of remote sensing in biodiversity studies and explore the role and advantages of LiDAR in biodiversity monitoring in forest ecosystems. Then, we examine the application of LiDAR in ecohydrology and discuss how to assimilate the ecological traits obtained using remote sensing, such as tree height and leaf area index, into ecosystem models to improve the ecosystem simulation accuracy. Finally, we introduce LiDAR applications for forest ecological modeling.