Background Laser scanning technology has opened new horizons for the research of forest dynamics, because it provides a largely automated and non-destructive method to rapidly capture the structure of individual trees and entire forest stands at multiple spatial scales. The structural data themselves or in combination with additional remotely sensed data also provide information on the local physiological state of structures within trees. The capacity of new methods is facilitated by the ongoing development of automated processing tools that are designed to capture information from the point cloud data provided by the remote measurements. Scope Terrestrial laser scanning (TLS), performed from the ground or from unmanned aerial vehicles, in particular, has potential to become a unifying measurement standard for forest research questions, because the equipment is flexible to use in the field and has the capacity to capture branch-level structural information at the forestplot or even forest scale. This issue of Annals of Botany includes selected papers that exemplify the current and potential uses of TLS, such as for examination of crown interactions between trees, growth dynamics of mixed stands, non-destructive characterization of urban trees, and enhancement of ecological and evolutionary models. The papers also present current challenges in the applicability of TLS methods and report recent developments in methods facilitating the use of TLS data for research purposes, including automatic processing chains and quantifying branch and above-ground biomass. In this article, we provide an overview of the current and anticipated future capacity of TLS and related methods in solving questions that utilize measurements and models of forests. Conclusions Due to its measurement speed, TLS provides a method to effortlessly capture large amounts of detailed structural forest information, and consequent proxy data for tree and forest processes, at a far wider spatial scale than is feasible with manual measurements. Issues with measurement precision and occlusion of laser beams before they reach their target structures continue to reduce the accuracy of TLS data, but the limitations are counterweighted by the measurement speed that enables large sample sizes. The currently high time-cost of analysing TLS data, in turn, is likely to decrease through progress in automated processing methods. The developments point towards TLS becoming a new and widely accessible standard tool in forest measurement and modelling.

中文翻译：

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地面激光扫描：森林测量和建模的新标准？

背景激光扫描技术为森林动力学研究开辟了新的视野，因为它提供了一种高度自动化和非破坏性的方法，可以在多个空间尺度上快速捕获单个树木和整个森林的结构。结构数据本身或与其他遥感数据相结合还提供有关树木内结构的局部生理状态的信息。不断开发的自动化处理工具有助于新方法的能力，这些工具旨在从远程测量提供的点云数据中捕获信息。范围 地面激光扫描 (TLS)，特别是从地面或无人机执行的，有可能成为森林研究问题的统一测量标准，因为该设备可以灵活地在现场使用，并且能够在林区甚至森林尺度上捕获分支级别的结构信息。本期《植物学年鉴》包括精选的论文，这些论文举例说明了 TLS 的当前和潜在用途，例如用于检查树木之间的树冠相互作用、混合林分的生长动态、城市树木的非破坏性表征以及生态和进化模型的增强. 这些论文还提出了 TLS 方法适用性方面的当前挑战，并报告了促进将 TLS 数据用于研究目的的方法的最新发展，包括自动处理链和量化分支和地上生物量。在本文中，我们概述了 TLS 的当前和预期未来能力以及相关方法在解决利用森林测量和模型的问题方面的能力。结论由于其测量速度，TLS 提供了一种方法，可以在比手动测量更广泛的空间范围内轻松捕获大量详细的结构森林信息以及随后的树木和森林过程的代理数据。测量精度和激光束在到达目标结构之前的遮挡问题继续降低 TLS 数据的准确性，但这些限制被能够实现大样本量的测量速度所抵消。反过来，目前分析 TLS 数据的高时间成本可能会随着自动化处理方法的进步而降低。