Bastian Schumann (recipient of three LASmoons)
Department of Remote Sensing and DLR German Aerospace Center
University of Würzburg, GERMANY

Background:
The Bavarian Forest National Park is a protected area in the southeast of Germany, where forest stands are unmanaged and are subject to long-term undisturbed natural processes. Scientists have chosen this site to study ecological and environmental processes on various levels. Remotely sensed data collected by airborne and spaceborne sensors allows them to monitor forest parameters such as tree species mixture, carbon fluxes and forest structure. LiDAR is particular useful for retrieval of vertical forest structure thanks to the laser ‘s ability to penetrate the canopy and capture both over- and understorey of forest stands. Various metrics computed from discrete return LiDAR data under leaf-off and leaf-on conditions are used to assess the extent and development of trees, shrubs and regeneration layers in natural forests.

Goal:
This project will extract relevant metrics from two sets of leaf-off and leaf-on LiDAR to make an accurate and unbiased estimation of canopy density in tree, shrub and herbal layers within the Bavarian Forest National Park. LAStools will be used to initially process the raw point cloud data and create DTMs, DSMs and CHMs and to derive LiDAR metrics from normalized LiDAR points over the entire area of the National Park. Performing these LiDAR processing steps over the extend of the entire National Park is computationally intense. The full version of LAStools is needed to assure timely processing of the vast amount of raw data. The results of this study will be used as a benchmark to compare with those previously achieved by Latifi et al. (2015) using leaf-on data across the same study area. The hypothesis is that using leaf-off LiDAR data together with complementary modeling approaches (e.g. beta regression and machine learning) will lead to improved results.

Data:
+ Two LiDAR data sets covering the entire area of Bavarian Forest National Park (24369 hectare = 243.69 square kilometers).
+ Leaf-off LiDAR from 2009 / 2010 flight campaign split in first- and last return data from the “Bayrisches Landesvermessungsamt”, the state surveying office of Bavaria. Average point density is 4 – 5 points/m² and points are classified in 5 categories: 1 = certain ground point, 2 = uncertain ground point, 3 = no ground point (object point), 4 = point on building, 9 = invalid point.
+ Leaf-on LiDAR from 2012 flight campaign recorded in full waveform and processed into high-density point cloud. The statistical metrics are already available for this dataset.

LAStools processing (leaf-off data only):
1) set classifications to 0 (= unclassified) and merge first and last return files [las2las]
2) tile data into 1000 x 1000 m² tiles with 25 m buffer to avoid edge artifacts [lastile]
3) extract ground points on many cores in parallel [lasground]
4).generate DTM from ground points on many cores in parallel [las2dem]
5) height-normalize tiles on many cores in parallel [lasheight]
6) derive metrics (percentiles, proportions and possibly density metrics) from height-normalized tiles on many cores in parallel. also measure pre-defined height strata to characterize the forest vertical layers as measured in the field campaign including 0-2 m (herbal layer), 2-5 m (shrub- and regeneration layer), 5-12 m (lower tree layers) and > 12 m (top tree layer) [lascanopy]
7) create a Canopy Height Model (CHM) using the pit-free method of Khosravipour et al. (2014) with the workflow described here [lasthin, las2dem, lasgrid]

Reference:
Khosravipour, A., Skidmore, A.K., Isenburg, M., Wang, T.J., Hussin, Y.A., 2014. Generating pit-free Canopy Height Models from Airborne LiDAR. PE&RS = Photogrammetric Engineering and Remote Sensing 80, 863-872.
Latifi, H., Heurich, M., Hartig, F., Müller, J., Krzystek, P., Jehl, H., Dech, S., 2015, Estimating over- and understorey canopy density of temperate mixed stands by airborne LiDAR data. Forestry (Article in Press). DOI. 10.1093/forestry/cpv032

This article could also be titled “How not to implement a national open data policy for massive geospatial data sets” or “Forget single-photon LiDAR, England already has single-quantum LiDAR” … (-:

Open data download portal for DSM and DTM rasters of England

But here comes the shocker and I would to make this a learning experience for those planning similar download portals. Again, the horizontal resolutions of the DTM and DSM rasters is 50 cm, 1 m, and 2 m. But what vertical resolution was chosen? I can still not quite believe it. It is more than micrometer, more than nanometers, and even more than picometers. I had to look up the name. The vertical resolution ranges from femtometers to attometers. This means that the ASCII numbers that specify the elevation for each grid cell are written down with 15 to 17 digits after the decimal point. Here an overview of units and the corresponding number of digits after the decimal point:

 0 - meters:      1.0
 1 - decimeters:  0.1
 2 - centimeters: 0.01
 3 - millimeters: 0.001
 6 - micrometers: 0.000001
 9 - nanometers:  0.000000001
12 - picometers:  0.000000000001
15 - femtometers: 0.000000000000001
18 - attometers:  0.000000000000000001

diameter of Helium atom =  62 picometers

D:\LAStools\bin>more LIDAR-DSM-1M-SP37\sp3070_DSM_1m.asc
ncols        1000
nrows        1000
xllcorner    430000.000000000000
yllcorner    270000.000000000000
cellsize     1.000000000000
NODATA_value  -9999
 79.9499969482421875 80.23999786376953125 80.95999908447265625 80.9199981689453125 80.90000152587890625 81.44000244140625 80.3300018310546875 79.68000030517578125 79.76000213623046875 79.69000244140625 79.56999969482421875 [...]

D:\LAStools\bin>lasgrid -i LIDAR-DSM-1M-SP37\*.asc ^
                      -step 1 -use_bb ^
                      -odir LIDAR-DSM-1M-SP37-NO-FLUFF -oasc ^
                      -cores 4

D:\LAStools\bin>more LIDAR-DSM-1M-SP37-NO-FLUFF\sp3070_DSM_1m.asc
ncols 1000
nrows 1000
xllcorner 430000.000000
yllcorner 270000.000000
cellsize 1.000000
NODATA_value -9999.0
79.95 80.24 80.96 80.92 80.90 81.44 80.33 79.68 79.76 79.69 79.57 [...]

Tim Sutton and his team at Kartoza work on flood modelling and risk assessment using Inasafe. They have been trying to generate a DTM from point cloud data derived via dense-matching from UAV imagery collected by an eBee of SenseFly in the “unplanned developments” or “slums” North West of Dar es Salaam, the capital city of Tanzania. Tim’s team was stuck after “other software” produced this result:

poor ground classification of “Tandale” with “other software”

Tim reached out to us at rapidlasso asking whether LAStools could handle this better. After all, we had published two blog articles – namely this one and that one – showing how to generate DTMs from the point clouds generated by the dense-matching photogrammetry software of Pix4D. Below the workflow we devised and the results we produced for Tim and his team.

We obtained 3 different data sets of areas called “Tandale”, “Borahatward”, and “Bugurunni”. We added one new option to our lasground software called ‘-bulge 1.0’ (see README) to improve the removal of smaller buildings and got this result for “Tandale”.

DTM of “Tandale” from ground points classified with LAStools

Before you point out the “facetted” look of this DTM keep in mind that “Tandale” is a densely populated poor area. A first hand account of the rough life in this area can be found here. Most dense-matching points are on corrugated roofs that become voids that need to be interpolated across in the DTM. Take a look at the corresponding DSM where all objects are still present.

DSM of “Tandale” from all dense-matching points

Below we give a detailed description at the example of the “Bugurunni” data set of the workflow that was used to generate DTMs for the three data sets. At the end of this article you will see some more results.

We first use lassort to quantize, sort, and compress on 4 cores the seven spatially incoherent LAS files of the “Bugurunni” data set (totalling 4.5 GB with excessive resolution of millimeters) into LASzip-compressed files with a more reasonable resolution of centimeters and points ordered along a space-filling curve. We also add the missing projection information with ‘-utm 37M’. The resulting 7 LAZ files occupy only 0.7 GB meaning we get a compression of 9 : 1. The option ‘-odir’ specifies the output directory.

lassort -i bugurunni_densified_*.las ^
        -rescale 0.01 0.01 0.01 ^
        -utm 37M ^
        -odir bugurunni_strips -olaz ^
        -cores 4

Next we tile the sorted strips into 500 meter by 500 meter tiles with 50 meter buffer using lastile. We use the new option ‘-flag_as_withheld’ to mark all buffer points with the withheld flag so they can easily be removed on-the-fly with the ‘-drop_withheld’ command-line filter (see the README file for more on this).

lastile -i bugurunni_strips\*.laz ^
        -files_are_flightlines ^
        -tile_size 500 -buffer 50 ^
        -flag_as_withheld ^
        -o bugurunni_raw\bugu.laz

lasnoise -i bugurunni_raw\*.laz ^
         -step_xy 2 -step_z 1 ^
         -isolated 15 ^
         -odir bugurunni_noise -olaz ^
         -cores 4

lasground -i bugurunni_noise\*.laz ^
          -ignore_class 7 ^
          -metro -bulge 1.0 ^
          -odir bugurunni_ground -olaz ^
          -cores 4

las2dem -i bugurunni_ground\*.laz ^
        -keep_class 2 ^
        -step 0.5 -kill 200 -use_tile_bb ^
        -odir bugurunni_dtm -obil ^
        -cores 4

lasgrid -i bugurunni_dtm\*.bil -merged ^
        -step 1.0 -average ^
        -o bugurunni_dtm.bil

blast2dem -i bugurunni_dtm.bil ^
          -hillshade -utm 37M ^
          -o bugurunni_dtm_hill.png

For comparison we also create a DSM with the same three steps but using all points.

las2dem -i bugurunni_raw\*.laz ^
        -step 0.5 -kill 200 -use_tile_bb ^
        -odir bugurunni_dsm -obil ^
        -cores 4
lasgrid -i bugurunni_dsm\*.bil -merged ^
        -step 1.0 -average ^
        -o bugurunni_dsm.bil
blast2dem -i bugurunni_dsm.bil ^
          -hillshade -utm 37M ^
          -o bugurunni_dsm_hill.png

DTM of “Bugurunni” from ground points classified with LAStools

Above you see the generated DTM and below the corresponding DSM. So yes, LAStools can create DTMs from points that are result of dense-matching photogrammetry … under one assumption: there is not too much vegetation.

DSM of “Bugurunni” from all dense-matching points

Below also the results for the “Borahatward” data. In a future blog post we will see how to deal with the excessive low noise sometimes present in dense-matching points.

DTM of “Borahatward” from ground points classified with LAStools

DSM of “Borahatward” from all dense-matching points

Anu Kramer (recipient of three LASmoons)
Stephens Lab, Fire Science Laboratory
Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management
University of California at Berkeley, USA

Background:
Large diameter trees are important to a wide variety of wildlife, including many species that are rare or endangered, such as the California Spotted Owl. LiDAR has been successfully utilized to identify the density of large trees, either by segmenting the LiDAR point cloud by individual trees, or by complex statistical models built on a suite of sometimes abstract metrics extracted from the LiDAR point cloud. Neither of these methods is easily accessible for land managers, and much LiDAR data available is being underutilized due to the steep learning curve of advanced processing.

California Spotted Owl (photo by Dan Hansen)

Goal:
This study seeks to derive a simple, yet effective method for estimating the density of large-stemmed trees from the LiDAR canopy height model, which is often delivered with the LiDAR and is easy to process by personnel trained in GIS, but with no specific LiDAR training. This method will then be used to quantify large tree density around known California Spotted Owl nest sites.

Data:
+ 225 square km of LiDAR in Meadow Valley, CA; 150 km northwest of Lake Tahoe .
+ average point density: 4.68 pts/m^2

LAStools processing:
1) merge and retile the original dataset with buffers [lastile]
2) height-normalize tiles on many cores in parallel [lasheight]
3) calculate a suite of 24 metrics for each of 143 plots x 3 plot sizes per plot [lascanopy]
   a)16 standard metrics
   b) 8 classes of relative percent cover across vertical height bins, as described in Kramer et al. (2014)
4) calculate a Canopy Height Model based on the methods of Khosravipour et al. (2014) with the workflow described here and compare it to a FUSION-derived CHM [las2dem, lasthin, lasgrid]

References:
Khosravipour, A., Skidmore, A.K., Isenburg, M., Wang, T.J., Hussin, Y.A., 2014. Generating pit-free Canopy Height Models from Airborne LiDAR. PE&RS = Photogrammetric Engineering and Remote Sensing 80, 863-872.
Kramer, H.A., Collins, B., Kelly, M., Stephens, S., 2014. Quantifying Ladder Fuels: A New Approach Using LiDAR. Forests 5(6), 1432–1453.

At PhoWo and INTERGEO 2015 rapidlasso was spending quality time with VisionMap who make the A3 Edge camera that provides fine resolution images from high altitudes and can quickly cover large areas. Under the hood of their LightSpeed software is the SURE dense-matching algorithm from nframes that turns images into photogrammetric point clouds. We were asked whether LAStools is able to create bare-earth DTM rasters from such points. If you have read our first, second, or third blog post on the topic you know that our asnwer was a resounding “YES!”. But we ran into an issue due to the large amount of low noise. Maybe the narrow angle between images at a high flying altitude affects the semi-global matching (SGM) algorithm. Either way, in the following we show how we use lascanopy and lasheight to mark low points as noise in a preprocessing step.

We obtained a USB stick containing a 2.42 GB file called “valparaiso_DSM_SURE_100.las” containing about 100 million points spaced 10 cm apart generated by SURE and stored with an (unnecessary high) resolution of millimeters (aka “resolution fluff”) as the third digit of all coordinates was always zero:

las2txt -i F:\valparaiso_DSM_SURE_100.las -stdout | more
255991.440 6339659.230 89.270
255991.540 6339659.240 89.270
255991.640 6339659.240 88.660
255991.740 6339659.230 88.730
[...]

We first compressed the bulky 2.42 GB LAS file into a compact 0.23 GB LAZ to our local hard drive – a file that is 10 times smaller and that will be 10 times faster to copy:

laszip -i F:\valparaiso_DSM_SURE_100.las ^
       -rescale 0.01 0.01 0.01 ^
       -o valparaiso_DSM_SURE_100.laz ^

Then we tiled the 100 million points into 250 meter by 250 meter tiles with 25 meter buffer using lastile. We use the new option ‘-flag_as_withheld’ to mark all buffer points with the withheld flag so they can be easily removed on-the-fly via the ‘-drop_withheld’ command-line filter (also see the README file).

lastile -i valparaiso_DSM_SURE_100.laz ^
        -tile_size 250 -buffer 25 ^
        -flag_as_withheld ^
        -odir valparaiso_tiles_raw -o val.laz

250 meter by 250 meter tiles with 25 meter buffer

excessive low noise affects ground classification

lascanopy -i val_256750_6338500.laz ^
          -height_cutoff -1000 -step 5 ^
          -p 5 10 15 20 ^
          -obil

lasview -i val_256750_6338500_*.bil -files_are_flightlines

comparing the 5th and the 10th elevation percentiles

lasheight -i val_256750_6338500.laz ^
          -ground_points val_256750_6338500_p10.bil ^
          -classify_below -0.5 7 ^
          -odix _denoised -olaz

points below 10th percentile surface marked as noise

At the end of the blog post we give the entire command sequence that first computes a 10th percentile raster with 5m resolution for the entire file with lascanopy and then marks all points of each tile below the10th percentile surface as noise with lasheight. When we classify all points into ground and non-ground points with lasground we ignore all points classified as noise. Here are the results:

DTM extracted from dense-matching points despite low noise

corresponding DSM with all buildings and vegetaion included

Above you see the generated DTM and the corresponding DSM. So yes, LAStools can create DTMs from points that are result of dense-matching photogrammetry … even when there is a lot of low noise. There are many other ways to mix and match the modules of LAStools for more refined workflows. Sometimes declaring all points below the 10th percentile surface as noise may be too agressive. In a future blog post we will look how to combine lascanopy and lasnoise for a more adaptive approach.

:: compute 10th percentile for entire area
lascanopy -i valparaiso_DSM_SURE_100.laz ^
          -height_cutoff -1000 -step 5 ^
          -p 10 ^
          -obil

:: tile input into 250 meter tiles with buffer
lastile -i valparaiso_DSM_SURE_100.laz ^
        -tile_size 250 -buffer 25 ^
        -flag_as_withheld ^
        -odir valparaiso_tiles_raw -o val.laz

:: mark points below as noise
lasheight -i valparaiso_tiles_raw/*.laz ^
          -ground_points valparaiso_DSM_SURE_100_p10.bil ^
          -classify_below -0.5 7 ^
          -odir valparaiso_tiles_denoised -olaz ^
          -cores 4

:: ground classify while ignoring noise points
 lasground -i valparaiso_tiles_denoised\*.laz ^
          -ignore_class 7 ^
          -town -bulge 0.5 ^
          -odir valparaiso_tiles_ground -olaz ^
          -cores 4 

:: create 50 cm DTM rasters in BIL format
las2dem -i valparaiso_tiles_ground\*.laz ^
        -keep_class 2 ^
        -step 0.5 -kill 200 -use_tile_bb ^
        -odir valparaiso_tiles_dtm -obil ^
        -cores 4 

:: average 50 cm DTM values into single 1m DTM 
lasgrid -i valparaiso_tiles_dtm\*.bil -merged ^
        -step 1.0 -average ^
        -o valparaiso_dtm.bil

:: create hillshade adding in UTM 19 southern
blast2dem -i valparaiso_dtm.bil ^
          -hillshade -utm 19M ^
          -o valparaiso_dtm_hill.png

:: create DSM hillshade with same three steps
las2dem -i valparaiso_tiles_raw\*.laz ^
        -step 0.5 -kill 200 -use_tile_bb ^
        -odir valparaiso_tiles_dsm -obil ^
        -cores 4
lasgrid -i valparaiso_tiles_dsm\*.bil -merged ^
        -step 1.0 -average ^
        -o valparaiso_dsm.bil
blast2dem -i valparaiso_dsm.bil ^
          -hillshade -utm 19M ^
          -o valparaiso_dsm_hill.png

Kiti Suomalainen (recipient of three LASmoons)
Energy Centre
University of Auckland, New Zealand

Background:
Auckland enjoys 2050 hours of sunshine annually, comparable to Melbourne (2100) and Istanbul (2026), yet it is lagging behind in solar power installations. However, Auckland Council is committed to a sustainable pathway in mobility and energy consumption, aiming at solar photovoltaic (PV) installations powering an equivalent of over 176 500 homes by 2040 (approx. 37% of all homes), among other sustainability targets. The council has recently (2013/2014) conducted a LiDAR survey of the Auckland region (image 0), which they have provided to me for free for this project.

Goal:
This project aims to use this data, to quantitatively and accurately assess the solar potential of Auckland region rooftops, and provide the results free for the public. Image 1 gives a crude example of what the results may look like. Using LAStools I expect to efficiently get a more detailed DSM and corresponding elevation rasters. The goal is for any resident or user to be able to zoom in to any property within the extent of the collected LiDAR data and get an idea of the solar potential on that particular rooftop. Results will be given in average winter day, average summer day and average annual solar radiation per rooftop (or optimal x sq metres of rooftop – e.g. optimally placed 4 typical sized panels’ area).

Data:
+ appoximately 2250 aquare kilometres of LiDAR data collected in 2013.
+ average point density: 1.5 points per sq metre.

LAStools processing:
1) create DTM tiles with 0.5 step, ground points only (classification 2), using the more efficient ‘.bil’ format [las2dem]
2) create DSM tiles with 0.5 step, first returns only, using the ‘.bil’ format [las2dem]
3) merge DTM and DSM tiles into single elevation raster [las2grid]
4).extract building footprints from the classified .las tiles (classification 6) for visualisation of final results, and reality checks [lasboundary]
5) use the raster files to calculate daily (winter day, summer day) and annual solar radiation on each rooftop (Solar Roof Tools by esri)

Reference:
Auckland Council, Low Carbon Auckland – Auckland’s Energy Resilience and Low Carbon Action Plan, July 2014.
NZ Aerial Mapping and Aerial Surveys Limited, LiDAR Flyover 2013/14 Project Final Report for Auckland Council, June 2015.

Raja Ram Aryal (recipient of three LASmoons)
Photogrammetry and Geoinformatics
University of Applied Sciences Stuttgart, GERMANY

Background:
Obtaining LiDAR-derived products like Digital Terrain Models (DTMs), Digital Surface Models (DSMs) and Canopy Height Models (CHMs) is a challenging task in steep forest areas. The Bavarian Forest National Park is an example of a steep terrain in central Europe.The national park mainly consists of alluvial spruce forest (700-900m altitude range), mixed mountain forest dominated by spruce, beech and fir (700-1150m) and high spruce forests (1150-1200m).
Leaf-on and leaf-off  LiDAR data acquisition affects the quality of the DTM needed for deriving a CHM. Different algorithms have been developed for separating ground points from non-ground points in steep forest terrains. The accuracy of such algorithms and their effect on derived forest attributes needs to be assessed. Furthermore, for various system-related or post processing reasons there are often “data pits” in the CHM. The “pit-free algorithm” developed by Khosravipour et al.(2014) that can be implemented with LAStools is currently the state-of-art for producing high-quality CHMs for better tree top detection. Further work is needed to investigate which other forest structure attributes can be derived with higher accuracy from a pit-free CHM than from a standard CHM.

Goal:
This study will focus on (1) evaluating the performance of a different ground classification algorithms across habitat types and topographical factors to assess their applicability for forest management in steep areas, and (2) comparing the accuracy of various forest parameter retrieved from pit-free versus standard CHMs incorporating the most accurate DTM derived from (1). To accomplish goal (1), DTMs will be produced by means of a set of commonly-used methods (REIN, MGF and TIN algorithms), which are then compared against precisely-recorded reference transect ground data, as well as across habitat types and topographical attributes. To accomplish goal (2) pit-free and standard CHMs will be derived and compared for various spatial plot-based models of forest structural attributes. The models will be cross-validated against the available forest inventory data.

standard 0.5m CHM from first-return Delaunay TIN

Data:
+ Two acquisitions of small footprint discrete return LiDAR data and Full wave-form are conducted in the study area. The full wave form LiDAR data has been captured in 2012 at the leaf-on condition. A two pulse discrete returns LiDAR data was captured in 2009 by the “Bayrisches Landesvermessungsamt” at the  leaf-off with a lower point density about 4-5 points per m².
+ The ground data are transect- and systematically recorded plot designs. The transect data (ca. 300 sub plots) is constrained to ecological gradients in some parts of the park, whereas the systematic grid data (ca. 120 plots) is distributed throughout the entire national park.

pit-free 0.5 m CHM with ‘-kill 2’

LAStools processing:
1) create square tiles with edge length of 1000 m and a 25 m buffer to avoid edge artifacts [lastile]
2) classify point clouds into ground and non-ground [lasground]
3) generate DTMs and DSMs [las2dem]
4).produce height normalized tiles [lasheight]
5) compute plot metrics for forest structure from height normalized tiles [lascanopy]
6) generate a Canopy Height Model (CHM) using the pit-free method of Khosravipour et al. (2014) with the workflow described here [lasthin, las2dem, lasgrid]

Reference:
Heurich, M., Fischer, F., Knörzer, O., Krzystek, P. 2008. Assessment of Digital Terrain Models (DTM) from data gathered with airborne laser scanning in temperate European beech (Fagus sylvatica) and Norway spruce (Picea abies) forests. Photogrammetrie, Fernerkundung, Geoinformation 6/2008: 473-488.
Khosravipour, A., Skidmore, A.K., Isenburg, M., Wang, T.J., Hussin, Y.A., 2014. Generating pit-free Canopy Height Models from Airborne LiDAR. PE&RS = Photogrammetric Engineering and Remote Sensing 80, 863-872.
Kobler, A., Pfeifer, N., PeterOgrinc, Todorovski, L., Oštir, K. and Džeroski, S. 2007: Repetitive interpolation: A robust algorithm for DTM generation from aerial laser scanner data in forested terrain. Remote Sensing of Environment 108, 9-23.
Latifi, H., Heurich, M., Hartig, F., Müller, J., Krzystek, P., Jehl, H., Dech, S., 2015, Estimating over- and understorey canopy density of temperate mixed stands by airborne LiDAR data. Forestry (Article in Press). DOI. 10.1093/forestry/cpv032
Latifi, H., Fassnacht, F. E., Müller, J., Tharani, A., Dech, S., and Heurich, M. (2015) Forest inventories by LiDAR data: A comparison of single tree segmentation and metric-based methods for inventories of a heterogeneous temperate forest, International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation 42: 162-174.
Meng, X.; Wang, L.; Silván-Cárdenas, J.L.; Currit, N. A multi-directional ground filtering algorithm for airborne LiDAR. ISPRS J. Photogramm. Remote Sens. 2009, 64, 117-124.

Alejandro Hinojosa (recipient of three LASmoons)
Earth Sciences Division
CICESE, MEXICO

Background:
The Baja California peninsula in Mexico is a land feature drifting away from the continent due to tectonic plate movement leaving in its path scars of well-defined and studied faults system. An aerial LiDAR survey of the Agua Blanca fault corridor was collected by NCALM to primarily delineate its trace and locate offset features along its path to eventually estimate fault slip rates. Faults may act as barriers or conduits of water that may enable the development of vegetation patches. It is known the presence of water springs and native long-lived high vegetation patches along the Agua Blanca fault. As a secondary use of the aerial LiDAR survey, we intend to demonstrate that the spatial distribution of native long-lived high trees (like oaks) in the region is influenced by the Agua Blanca fault, indirectly by the persistent water resource from its springs.

Goal:
The aim of this research is to assess through remote sensing the relation of the spatial distribution of native vegetation patches and the Agua Blanca Fault in Ensenada, Baja California, Mexico. We plan to use spatial analysis tools on passive (optical) and active sensors data to achieve our goal. A Canopy Height Model (CHM) will be calculated from the LiDAR data using the “pit-free” algorithm of (Khosravipour et.al., 2014) that can be implemented with LAStools. We will then investigae spatial correlation of the fault traces delineated from a Digital Terrain Model (DTM) and the vegetation patches obtained from the CHM. Hydrology models will be applied to the DTM in order to differentiate vegetation patches occurring in accumulation zones (like canyons) from those occurring along fault traces.

Data:
+ 75 square km of aerial LiDAR along Agua Blanca Fault corridor collected by NCALM on July 2014.
+ average point density: 5 pts/m2

LAStools processing:
1) quality control of LiDAR [lasoverlap, lascontrol, lasinfo, lasgrid]
2) create a tiling with buffers [lastile]
3) classify points and create a DTM and DSM [lasground, las2dem, blast2dem]
4).normalized the LiDAR tiles [lasheight]
5) generate a Canopy Height Model (CHM) using the pit-free method of Khosravipour et al. (2014) with the workflow described here [lasthin, las2dem, lasgrid]

Reference:
Hooper, E. C. D. (1991). Fluid migration along growth faults in compacting sediments. Journal of Petroleum Geology, 14(2), 161-180.
Khosravipour, A., Skidmore, A.K., Isenburg, M., Wang, T.J., Hussin, Y.A., 2014. Generating pit-free Canopy Height Models from Airborne LiDAR. PE&RS = Photogrammetric Engineering and Remote Sensing 80, 863-872.
Carter, R. E., y Klinka, K. (1990). Relationships between growing-season soil water-deficit, mineralizable soil nitrogen and site index of coastal Douglas fir. Forest Ecology and Management, 30(1), 301-311.

Geoffrey Ower (recipient of three LASmoons)
School of Biological Sciences
Illinois State University, Normal, USA

Background:
The spatial distribution and abundance of mosquitoes is important because biting mosquitoes can acquire and transmit pathogens such as viruses that infect humans or domestic animals. There have been 1,263 confirmed human infections with mosquito-borne West Nile virus in Illinois since 2003. In 2004 there was an epidemic of mosquito-borne La Crosse encephalitis, which resulted in 9 human cases in Illinois (USGS, HHS & CDC 2015). Understanding the geographical factors that influence mosquito species’ distributions could help to predict at-risk areas, which could in turn help to prioritize public health efforts to control mosquitoes and the diseases that they transmit more effectively.

The spatial distribution of mosquitoes depends in a large part upon the availability of water sources because mosquito larval and pupal stages are aquatic. Some mosquito species are specialized to use water-filled natural (e.g., treeholes, rockholes) or artificial (e.g., buckets, discarded tires) containers. Mosquitoes also require access to blood meals, access to carbohydrates (e.g., nectar), and resting sites. Spatial factors thought to be important in determining the spatial distribution and abundance of container-dwelling mosquitoes include land cover and land use (Diuk-Wasser et al. 2006), temperature, precipitation (Ruiz et al. 2010), elevation (Sun et al. 2009), human population density (Higa et al. 2010), and socioeconomic status (Dowling et al. 2013).

Goal:
The objective of this project is to determine what spatial factors predict the distribution and abundance of mosquito species in Bloomington-Normal, Illinois. Species distribution maps will be produced for each species of mosquito that colonized oviposition traps (water-filled plastic cups lined with paper on which mosquito eggs are laid) placed on sampling transects during three sampling periods in August and September 2015. Poisson regression models will be used to produce maps predicting the occurrence of each mosquito species for the full 509 square kilometre study area.

Data:
+ 509 square kilometres of LiDAR data including Bloomington-Normal, Illinois, U.S.A. and surrounding areas with an average point density of 3.12 points/square metre classified into LAS Specification v1.2 codes: 1 (unclassified), 2 (ground), 7 (noise/low points), 9 (water), 10 (ignored ground: breakline proximity).

LAStools processing:
1) check the quality of the LiDAR data [lasoverlap, lascontrol, lasinfo, lasgrid]
2) merge and retile the original data [lastile]
3) classify point clouds into ground and non-ground [lasground]
4) create digital terrain (DTM) and digital surface models (DSM) [las2dem, blast2dem]
5) classify building and vegeration points [lasclassify]
6) extract building footprints [lasboundary]
7).produce height normalized tiles [lasheight]
8) generate a Canopy Height Model (CHM) with the workflow described here using the pit-free algorithm of Khosravipour et al. (2014) [lasthin, las2dem, lasgrid]

References:
Diuk-Wasser, M. A., Brown, H. E., Andreadis, T. G., Fish, D. 2006. Modeling the spatial distribution of mosquito vectors for West Nile virus in Connecticut, USA. Vector-Borne and Zoonotic Diseases 6: 283-295.
Dowling, Z., Ladeau, S. L., Armbruster, P., Biehler, D., Leisnham, P. T. 2013. Socioeconomic status affects mosquito (Diptera: Culicidae) larval habitat type availability and infestation level. Journal of Medical Entomology 50: 764-772.
Higa, Y., Yen, N. T., Kawada, H., Son, T. H., Hoa, N. T., Takagi, M. 2010. Geographic distribution of Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus collected from used tires in Vietnam. Journal of the American Mosquito Control Association 26: 1-9.
Khosravipour, A., Skidmore, A. K., Isenburg, M., Wang, T. J., Hussin, Y. A. 2014. Generating pit-free Canopy Height Models from Airborne LiDAR. Photogrammetric Engineering and Remote Sensing 80: 863-872.
Ruiz, M. O., Chaves, L. F., Hamer, G. L., Sun, T., Brown, W. M., Walker, E. D., Haramis, L., Goldberg, T. L. Kitron, U. D. 2010. Local impact of temperature and precipitation on West Nile virus infection in Culex species mosquitoes in northeast Illinois, USA. Parasites & vectors 3: 19.
Sun, X., Fu, S., Gong, Z., Ge, J., Meng, W., Feng, Y., Wang, J., Zhai, Y., Wang, H. H., Nasci, R. S., Tang, Q., Liang, G. 2009. Distribution of arboviruses and mosquitoes in Northwestern Yunnan Province, China. Vector-Borne and Zoonotic Diseases 9: 623-630.
USGS, HHS & CDC. 2015. Disease maps. http://diseasemaps.usgs.gov/mapviewer

Andreas Konring and Susanne Bjerg Petersen (recipients of three LASmoons)
Department of Environmental Engineering
Technical University of Denmark, Lyngby, DENMARK

Background:
Copenhagen has in the recent years experienced severe floodings due to cloudbursts which has increased the focus of climate adaption and the implementation of green infrastructure. The use of sustainable urban drainage system (SUDS) solutions to divert stormwater from the existing drainage system will be a central measure to increase the climate resilience while greenifying the city and Copenhagen municipality is investing 700 million euros in SUDS projects alone. Additionally, the city has decided to plant 100.000 new trees in the next 10 years as another measure to enhance natural amenities but also because of air cleansing and cooling effects. However, it has not been investigated what effect the current canopy cover has on the rainwater retention due to increased evaporation and soil infiltration and if planting more trees could help improve the pluvial flooding issues.

Example of a pit-free CHM in an urban environment.

Goal:
This study aims to estimate the current number of trees and extract tree metrics such as volume, canopy cover and densities with the use of the national LIDAR dataset and NIR ortophotos from summer and spring. These canopy metrics will be used to inform a simple tree model which will be implemented in a 2-D overland flow model to assess the effect of trees on flood mitigation. The created CHM could also be used in further analysis of the urban heat island effect.

Data:
+ 100 square kilometers of the Danish national LiDAR dataset collected in November 2014 covering the municipality of Copenhagen.
+  density of 4 – 5 last-returns per square meter
+  classified into surface (1), ground (2), vegetation (3,4,5), buildings (6), noise (7) and water (9).

LAStools processing:
1) create square tiles with buffer to avoid edge artifacts [lastile]
2) generate DTMs and DSMs with only buildings and terrain [las2dem]
3).normalize height, remove outliers and keep classes 2, 5 and 6 [lasheight]
4) create rasters with forest metrics [lascanopy]
5) calculate the pit-free Canopy Height Model (CHM) proposed by Khosravipour et al. (2014) [lasthin, las2dem, lasgrid]

Reference:
Copenhagen Municipality, 2011. Copenhagen Climate Adaption Plan.
Geodatastyrelsen, 2014. Danmarks højdemodel, DHM/Punktsky – Dataversion 2.0 januar 2015. Product specification.
Khosravipour, A., Skidmore, A.K., Isenburg, M., Wang, T.J., Hussin, Y.A., 2014. Generating pit-free Canopy Height Models from Airborne LiDAR. PE&RS = Photogrammetric Engineering and Remote Sensing 80, 863-872.

Asanga Ramanayake (recipient of three LASmoons)
BGSU Remote Sensing Lab, School of Earth, Environment and Society
Bowling Green State University, Ohio, USA

Background:
Lake Erie is the Southern most of the Great Lakes and it is shared by 4 states and 2 countries. It is the shallowest, warmest, and most biologically productive of all the Great Lakes. At wetland habitats along the Western Lake Erie coast, more than 300 species of plants have been identified. To study land use and to classify vegetation cover it is important to consider the vertical distribution of the vegetation. LiDAR is an active data collection system for generating 3D spatial information of objects. High-resolution Digital Terrain Models (DTMs) and Digital Surface Models (DSMs) can be generated from the available LiDAR points that allow accurate estimates of canopy height.

Goal:
The main goal of this project is to derive Digital Terrain Models (DTMs) and Digital Surface Models (DSMs) for the coastal areas of Lake Erie using LIDAR data to estimate the height of the canopy. The derived products will be validated with in-situ measurements from other researchers and compared with ASTER Global Digital Elevation Model data.

coastal area LiDAR data coverage for Lake Erie

Data:
+ The Ohio Geographically Referenced Information Program (OGRIP) has free downloadable LIDAR data in LAS format that was acquired by Ohio Statewide Imagery Program (OSIP) in 2006-2008.
+ In 2011-2012 NOAA’s mission was capturing coastal area LiDAR data. This data is served to the public and available in LAZ format.

LAStools processing:
1) create square tiles to avoid edge artifacts [lastile]
2) classify point clouds into ground and non-ground [lasground]
3) generate DTMs and DSMs for the coastal areas of Lake Erie [las2dem]
4).produce height normalized tiles [lasheight]
5) generate a Canopy Height Model (CHM) using the pit-free method of Khosravipour et al. (2014) [lasthin, las2dem, lasgrid]

Reference:
Herdendorf, Charles E. The ecology of the coastal marshes of western Lake Erie: a community profile. OHIO STATE UNIV COLUMBUS, 1987.
Deems, Jeffrey S., Thomas H. Painter, and David C. Finnegan. “Lidar Measurement of Snow Depth: A Review.” Journal of Glaciology 59.215 (2013): 467–479. IngentaConnect. Web.
Jensen, John R. Remote Sensing of the Environment: An Earth Resource Perspective. 2nd ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2007. Print. Prentice Hall Series in Geographic Information Science.
Khosravipour, A., Skidmore, A.K., Isenburg, M., Wang, T.J., Hussin, Y.A., 2014. Generating pit-free Canopy Height Models from Airborne LiDAR. PE&RS = Photogrammetric Engineering and Remote Sensing 80, 863-872.

Jakob Iglhaut (recipient of three LASmoons)
Program for Geospatial Information Management
Carinthia University of Applied Sciences, Villach, AUSTRIA

Background:
As part of the EU LIFE programme two river stretches in Carinthia, Austria have recently been subject to restoration measures. The LIFE-project aims at protecting valuable riverine flora and fauna while improving flood protection. By remodelling the river beds, the construction of groynes and still water bodies the river environment was directed to more natural morphology and state. The joint R&D project “Remotely Piloted Aircraft Multi Sensor System (RPAMSS)” aims at capturing multi-dimensional environmental data in order to monitor the development of these rivers stretches in a holistic way. Flights with an RTK capable fixed wing UAV are carried out at a particular section of the rivers Gail and Drau respectively. The project site at the Upper-Drau is located in the area of Obergottesfeld, Austria (560m ASL), with an area currently remotely monitored by the RPAmSS of approximately 3.5km². The second study area is located close to Feistritz at the river Gail (550m ASL) with an area of approx. 0.9km². Apart from being addressed by the LIFE project both study areas are also defined as NATURA 2000 nature protection sites. In both areas frequent UAV flights are carried out collecting high-resolution multi-spectral imagery. Structure from Motion photogrammetry enables the creation of high-density multi-spectral point clouds.

Goal:
The aim of the project is to assess the morphology and related temporal changes of the described riverine environment based on SfM point clouds. A full processing chain will be developed to take full advantage of the high-density data. Particular interest lies in the extraction of ground points underneath vegetation in leaf-on/leaf-off. Ground points will be gridded to generate DTMs. The qualitative performance of the data will be held against an ALS acquired DTM. Furthermore forest metrics will be extracted for the riparian zone in order to quantify their current state and changes.

Data:
+ High-density multi-spectral (R,G,B,NIR) SfM derived point clouds (UAS imagery)
+ Variable point densities, GSD ~3cm.

LAStools processing:
1) fix SfM owing incoherence [lassort]
2) create 100m tiles (10m buffer) for parallel processing [lastile]
3) noise removal introduced by the SfM algorithm [lasnoise]
4).extract ground points [lasground_new]
5) generate normalized above heights [lasheight]
6) classify based on height-above-ground (low veg, high veg) [lasheight]
7) create DSM and DTM [blast2dem]
8) generate a Canopy Height Model (CHM) using the pit-free method of Khosravipour et al. (2014) with the workflow described here [lasthin, las2dem, lasgrid]
9) sub-sample the point clouds for other (spectral) analyses [lassplit, lasthin, lasmerge]

Reference:
Westoby, M. J., et al. “Structure-from-Motion photogrammetry: A low-cost, effective tool for geoscience applications.” Geomorphology 179 (2012): 300-314.
Fonstad, Mark A., et al. “Topographic structure from motion: a new development in photogrammetric measurement.” Earth Surface Processes and Landforms 38.4 (2013): 421-430.
Khosravipour, A., Skidmore, A.K., Isenburg, M., Wang, T.J., Hussin, Y.A., 2014. Generating pit-free Canopy Height Models from Airborne LiDAR. PE&RS = Photogrammetric Engineering and Remote Sensing 80, 863-872.
Javernick, L., J. Brasington, and B. Caruso. “Modeling the topography of shallow braided rivers using Structure-from-Motion photogrammetry.” Geomorphology 213 (2014): 166-182.

Patricia Andrade (recipient of three LASmoons)
Earth Sciences Division
CICESE, MEXICO

Background:
The relief in the northwest coast of Baja California is subject to different processes. One process that has a major impact are landslides. The near-shore landslides have been a significant problem because this area coincides with the location of the Tijuana-Ensenada Scenic highway which is one of the main routes between Tijuana and Ensenada. On 28 December 2013 a rotational slip in the stretch of 93 km caused the closure of the Tijuana-Ensenada highway. Several measurements with emerging techniques such as photogrammetry by drones and terrestrial and airborne LiDAR surveys were taken since the landslide. From airborne LiDAR point clouds of different dates DTM are created and used to estimate differences (James, 2012). From terrestrial LiDAR point clouds the characteristics of planes and lines (i.e. striations) on the footwall are determined. An analysis of such geomorphological processes can facilitate a rapid response and help to reopen the highways faster.

TLS point cloud of the landslide in the stretch km93 +50 (January 2014).

Goal:
The main goal of this project is to estimate the volume change on the landslide’s day and later years from digital terrain models (DTMs) of pre-event data (2006) and post-event (2013, 2014 and 2016). A second goal is to create a model of surface strain from TLS data and a point cloud (2013).

Data:
+ DTM of 2006 (pre-event) from the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI).
+ relief data of the day of landslide (2013) obtained by photogrammetry from 144 photos taken with a DJi S800 drone.
+ DTM from January 2014 aquired by satellite photogrammetry of images from GeoEye 1.
+ 11 TLS point clouds scanned and co-registered in February 2014  with a Faro Focus 3D x330.
+ NCALM aerial LiDAR captured In July 2014 of th landslide zone.
+ highway rehabilitation data taken in March 2016 from RGB / NIR photos of eBee drone flights.

LAStools processing:
1) create square tiles with buffers [lastile]
2) classify isolated points as noise [lasnoise]
3) classify points clouds into ground and non-ground [lasground]
4).generate DTMs from ground-classified points [las2dem]
5) change the resolution of DEMs [lasgrid]
6) create hillshades of the DTMs [blast2dem]

References:
James, L. A., Hodgson, M. E., Ghoshal, S., Latiolais, M. M., 2012. Geomorphic change detection using historic maps and DEM differencing: The temporal dimension of geospatial analysis. Geomorphology 137, 181-198.

Jane Meiforth (recipient of three LASmoons)
Environmental Remote Sensing and Geoinformatics
University of Trier, GERMANY

Background:
The New Zealand Kauri trees (or Agathis australis) are under threat by the so called Kauri dieback disease. This disease is caused by a fungi like spore, which blocks the transport for nutrition and water in the trunk and finally kills the trees. Symptoms of the disease in the canopy like dropping of leaves and bare branches offer an opportunity for analysing the state of the disease by remote sensing. The study site covers three areas in the Waitakere Ranges, west of Auckland with Kauri trees in different growth and health classes.

Goal:
The main objective of this study is to identify Kauri trees and canopy symptoms of the disease by remote sensing, in order to support the monitoring of the disease. In the first step LAStools will be used to extract the tree crowns and describe their characteristics based on height metrics, shapes and intensity values from airborne LiDAR data. In the second step, the spectral characteristics of the tree crowns will be analyzed based on very high resolution satellite data (WV02 and WV03). Finally the best describing spatial and spectral parameters will be combined in an object based classification, in order to identify the Kauri trees and different states of the disease..

Data:
+ high resolution airborne LiDAR data (15-35p/sqm, ground classified) taken in January 2016
+ 15cm RGB aerial images taken on the same flight as the LIDAR data
+ ground truth field data from 2100 canopy trees in the study areas, recorded January – March 2016
+ helicopter images taken in January – April 2016 from selected Kauri trees by Auckland Council
+ vector layers with infrastructure data like roads and hiking tracks

LAStools processing:
1) create square tiles with edge length of 1000 m and a 25 m buffer to avoid edge artifacts [lastile]
2) generate DTMs and DSMs [las2dem]
3).produce height normalized tiles [lasheight]
4) generate a pit-free Canopy Height Model (CHM) using the method of Khosravipour et al. (2014) with the workflow described here [lasthin, las2dem, lasgrid]
5) extract crown polygons based on the pit-free CHM [inverse watershed method in GIS, las2iso]
6) normalize the points of each crown with constant ground elevation to avoid slope effects [lasclip, las2las with external source for the ground elevation]
7) derive height metrics for each crown on base of the normalized crown points [lascanopy]
8) derive intensity statistics for the crown points [lascanopy with ‘-int_avg’, ‘-int_std’ etc. on first returns]
9) derive metrics correlated with the dropping of leaves like canopy density, canopy cover and gap fraction for the crown points [lascanopy with ‘–cov’, ‘–dns’, ‘–gap’, ‘–fraction’]

Reference:
Hu B, Li J, Jing L, Judah A. Improving the efficiency and accuracy of individual tree crown delineation from high-density LiDAR data. International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation. 2014; 26: 145-55.
Khosravipour, A., Skidmore, A.K., Isenburg, M., Wang, T.J., Hussin, Y.A., 2014. Generating pit-free Canopy Height Models from Airborne LiDAR. PE&RS = Photogrammetric Engineering and Remote Sensing 80, 863-872.
Li J, Hu B, Noland TL. Classification of tree species based on structural features derived from high density LiDAR data. Agricultural and Forest Meteorology. 2013; 171-172: 104-14.
MPI New Zealand http://www.kauridieback.co.nz – website with information on the kauri dieback disease
Vauhkonen, J., Ene, L., Gupta, S., Heinzel, J., Holmgren, J., Pitkänen, J., Solberg, S., Wang, Y., Weinacker, H., Hauglin, K. M., Lien, V., Packalén, P., Gobakken, T., Koch, B., Næsset, E., Tokola, T. and Maltamo, M. (2012) Comparative testing of single-tree detection algorithms under different types of forest. Forestry, 85, 27-40.

At INTERGEO 2016 in Hamburg, the guys from Aerowest GmbH shared with us a small photogrammetric point cloud from the city of Soest that had been generated with the SURE dense-matching software from nFrames. We want to test whether – using LAStools – we can generate a decent DTM from these points that are essentially a gridded DSM. If this interest you also see this, this, this, and this story.

Here you can download the four original tiles (tile1, tile2, tile3, tile4) that we are using in these experiments. We first re-tile them into smaller 100 meter by 100 meter tiles with a 20 meter buffer using lastile. We use option ‘-flag_as_withheld’ that flags all the points falling into the buffer using the withheld flag so they can easily be removed on-the-fly later with the ‘-drop_withheld’ filter (see the README for more on this). We also add the missing projection with ‘-epsg 32632’.

lastile -i original\*.laz ^
        -tile_size 100 -buffer 20 ^
        -flag_as_withheld ^
        -epsg 32632 ^
        -odir tiles_raw -o soest.laz

Below is a screenshot from one of the resulting 100 meter by 100 meter tiles (with 20 meter buffer) that we will be focusing on in the following experiments.

The tile ‘soest_437900_5713800.laz’ used in all experiments.

Next we use lassort to reorder the points ordered along a coherent space-filling curve as the existing scan-line order has the potential to cause our triangulation engine to slow down. We do this on 4 cores.

lassort -i tiles_raw\*.laz ^
        -odir tiles_sorted -olaz ^
        -cores 4

We then use lasthin to lower the number of points that we consider as ground points (see the README for more info on this tool). We do this because the original 5 cm spacing of the dense matching points is a bit excessive for generating a DTM with a resolution of, for example, 50 cm. Instead we only use the lowest point in each 20 cm by 20 cm cell as a candidate for becoming a ground point, which reduces the number of considered points by a factor of 16. We achieve this by classifying these lowest point to a unique classification code (here: 9) and later tell lasground to ignore all other classifications.

lasthin -i tiles_sorted\*.laz ^
        -step 0.2 -lowest -classify_as 9 ^
        -odir tiles_thinned -olaz ^
        -cores 4

lasground -i tiles_thinned\*.laz ^
          -step 20 -bulge 0.5 -spike 0.5 -fine ^
          -ignore_class 0 ^
          -odir tiles_ground -olaz ^
          -cores 4

The RGB colors of low-accuracy points are mostly from very dark shadowed areas.

las2las -i tiles_thinned\*.laz ^
        -keep_RGB_red 0 7680 ^
        -keep_RGB_green 0 8960 ^
        -keep_RGB_blue 0 10240 ^
        -filtered_transform ^
        -set_classification 7 ^
        -odir tiles_rgb_filtered -olaz ^
        -cores 4

Points whose RGB values indicate they might lie in the shadows.

lasground -i tiles_thinned\*.laz ^
          -step 20 -bulge 0.5 -spike 0.5 -fine ^
          -ignore_class 0 7 ^
          -odir tiles_ground -olaz ^
          -cores 4

Finally we create a DTM with blast2dem (see README) and a DSM with lasgrid (see README) by merging all points into one file but dropping the buffer points that were marked as withheld by the initial run of lastile (see README).

blast2dem -i tiles_ground\*.laz -merged ^
          -drop_withheld -keep_class 2 ^
          -step 0.5 ^
          -o dtm.bil

lasgrid -i tiles_ground\*.laz -merged ^
        -drop_withheld ^
        -step 0.5 -average ^
        -o dsm.bil

lasview -i dtm.bil dsm.bil -faf

Stéphane Henriod (recipient of three LASmoons)
National Statistical Committee of the Kyrgyz Republic
Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan

This pilot study is part of the International Climate Initiative project called “Ecosystem based Adaptation to Climate change in the high mountainous regions of Central Asia” that is funded by the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Building and Nuclear Safety (BMU) of Germany and implemented by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH in Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Kazakhstan.

Background:
The ecosystems in high mountainous regions of Central Asia are characterized by a unique diversity of flora and fauna. In addition, they are the foundation of the livelihoods of the local population. Specific benefits include clean water, pasture, forest products, protection against floods and landslides, maintenance of soil fertility, and ecotourism. However, the consequences of climate change such as melting glaciers, changing river runoff regimes, and weather anomalies including sharp temperature fluctuations and non-typical precipitation result in negative impacts on these ecosystems. Coupled with unwise land use, these events damage fragile mountain ecosystems and reduce their regeneration ability undermining the local population’s livelihoods. Therefore, people living in rural areas and directly depending on natural resources must adapt to adverse impacts of climate change. This can be done through a set of measures, known in the world practice as ecosystem-based adaptation (EbA) approach. It promotes the sustainable use of natural resources to sustain and enhance the livelihood of the population depending on those resources.

Goal:
In two selected pilot regions of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, planned measures will concentrate on climate-informed management of ecosystems in order to maintain their services for the rural population. EbA always starts with identifying the vulnerability of the local population. Besides analyzing the socio-economic situation of the local population, this includes (1) assessing the ecological conditions of the ecosystems in the watershed and the related ecosystem services people benefit from, (2) identifying potential disaster risks, and (3) analyzing glacier dynamics with its response to water runoff. As a baseline to achieve this and to get spatially explicit, remote sensing based techniques and mapping activities need to be utilized.

A first UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) mission has taken place in the Darjomj watershed of the Bartang valley in July 2016. RGB-NIR images as well as a high-resolution Digital Surface Model have been produced that now need to be segmented and analysed in order to produce comprehensive information. The main processing that will take advantage of LAStools is the generation of a DTM from the DSM that will then be used for identifying risk areas (flood zones, landslides and avalanches, etc.). The results of this approach will ultimately be compared with lower-cost satellite images (RapidEye, Planet, Sentinel).

Data:
+ High-resolution RGB and NIR image (10 cm) from a SenseFly Ebee
+ High-resolution DSM (10 cm) from a SenseFly Ebee

LAStools processing:
1) classify DSM points obtained via dense-matching photogrammetry into a SenseFly Ebee imagery into ground and non-ground points via processing pipelines as described here and here [lastile, lassort, lasnoise, lasground]
2) create a DTM [las2dem, lasgrid, blast2dem]
3) produce 3D visualisations to facilitate the communication around adaptation to climate change [lasview]

Alen Berta (recipient of three LASmoons)
Department of Terrestrial Ecosystems and Landscape, Faculty of Forestry
University of Zagreb and Oikon Ltd Institute for Applied Ecology, CROATIA

Background:
After becoming the EU member state, Croatia is obliged to fulfill the obligation risen from the Kyoto protocol: National Inventory Report (NIR) of the Green House Gasses according to UNFCCC. One of the most important things during the creation of the NIR is to know how many forested areas there are and their wood stock and increment. This is needed to calculate the size of the existing carbon pool and its potential for sequestration. Since in Croatia, according to legislative, it is not mandatory to calculate the wood stock and yield of the degraded forest areas (shrubbery and thickets) during the creation of the usual forest management plans, this data is missing. So far, only a rough approximation of the wood stock and increment is used during the creation of NIR. However, these areas are expanding every year due to depopulation of the rural areas and the cessation of traditional farming.

very diverse stand structure of degraded forest areas (shrubbery and thickets)

Goal:
This study will focus on two things: (1) Developing regression models for biomass volume estimation in continental shrubberies and thickets based on airborne LiDAR data. To correlate LiDAR data with biomass volume, over 70 field plots with a radius of 12 meters have been established in more than 550 ha of the hilly and lowland shrubberies in Central Croatia and all trees and shrubberies above 1 cm Diameter at Breast Height (DBH) were recorded with information about tree species, DBH and height. Precise locations of the field plots are measured with survey GNNS and biomass is calculated with parameters from literature. For regression modeling, various statistics from the point clouds matching the field plots will be used (i.e. height percentiles, standard deviation, skewness, kurtosis, …). 2) Testing the developed models for different laser pulse densities to find out if there is a significant deviation from results if the LiDAR point cloud is thinner. This will be helpful for planning of the later scanning for the change detection (increment or degradation).

Data:
+ 641 square km of discrete returns LiDAR data around the City of Zagreb, the capitol of Croatia (but since it is highly populated area, only the outskirts of the area will be used)
+ raw geo-referenced LAS files with up to 3 returns and an average last return point density of 1 pts/m².

LAStools processing:
1) extract area of interest [lasclip or las2las]
2) create differently dense versions (for goal no. 2) [lasthin]
3) remove isolated noise points [lasnoise]
4) classify point clouds into ground and non-ground [lasground]
5) create a Digital Terrain Model (DTM) [las2dem]
6) compute height of points above the ground [lasheight]
7) classify point clouds into vegetation and other [lasclassify]
8) normalize height of the vegetation points [lasheight]
9) extract the areas of the field plots [lasclip]
10) compute various metrics for each plot [lascanopy]
11) convert LAZ to TXT for regression modeling in R [las2txt]

UPDATE: (January 6th): Our new tutorial “downloading Bonn in LiDAR“.
UPDATE: (January 9th): Now a second state went open LiDAR as well. 

Kudos to OpenNRW for offering online download links for hundreds of Gigabytes of open LiDAR for the entire state of North Rhine-Westphalia (Nordrhein-Westfalen) as announced a few months ago:

• download raw LiDAR points describing the DTM (DGM)
• download raw LiDAR points describing the DSM (DOM)

More and more countries, states, and municipalities are deciding to make their LiDAR archives accessible to the general public. Some are doing entirely for free with instant online download and a generous open license that allows data sharing and commercial use. Others still charge a “small administrative fee” and require filling our actual paperwork with real signatures in ink and postal mailing of hard drives that can easily take half a year to complete. Some licences are also stricter in terms of data sharing and commercial use.

And then there was Germany where all the LiDAR data has traditionally been locked up in some cave by the 16 state survey departments and was sold for more than just a fee. Financial reasons would usually prohibit residents in Germany from making, for example, an elevation profile for their favorite mountain bike trail for hobby purposes. Or starting a small side business that (for 5 Euro a sheet) sells “Gassi Maps” with elevation-optimized dog walking paths of low incline that go past suitable potty spots and dog-friendly coffee shops.

The reason that many national and state mapping agencies have opened their LiDAR holdings for free and unencumbered access are manifold. A previous blog post had looked at the situation in England whose Environment Agency also used to sell LiDAR data and derivatives. The common argument that government agencies have been using to justify selling data (paid for with taxes) to those very same tax payers was that this would be used to finance future surveys.

It was the “freedom of information” request by Louise Huby on November 21st, 2014 that exposed this as a flawed argument. The total amount of revenue generated for all LiDAR and derivatives sales by the Environment Agency was just around £323,000 per year between 2007 and 2014. This figure was dwarfed by its annual operational budget of £1,025,000,000 in 2007/08. The revenue from LiDAR sales was merely 0.03 percent of the agencies’s budget. That can maybe pay for free coffee and tea in the office, but not for future airborne LiDAR flights. The reaction was swift. In September 2015 the Environment Agency made all their DTM and DSM rasters down to 0.25 meter resolution available online for open access and in March 2016 added the raw point clouds for download in LAZ format with a very permissible license. It has since been an incredible success story and the Environment Agency has been propelled into the role of a “champion for open data” as sketched in my ACRS 2016 keynote talk that is available on video here.

Frustrated with the situation in Germany and inspired by the change in geospatial data policy in England, we have been putting in similar “Frag den Staat” freedom of information requests with 11 of the 16 German state mapping agencies, asking about how much sales revenue was generated annually from their LiDAR and derivative sales. These four states denied the request:

• Bavaria (Bayern)
• Hesse (Hessen)
• Saxony (Sachsen)
• Baden-Württemberg (Baden-Württemberg)

We never heard back from Lower Saxony (Niedersachsen) and Thuringia (Thüringen) wanted more fees than we were willing to spend on this, but our information requests were answered by five states that are here listed with the average amount of reported revenue per year in EUR:

• Rhineland-Palatinate (Rheinland-Pfalz), 58,012 / year (2005 – 2015)
• Saxony-Anhalt (Sachsen-Anhalt), 132,350 / year (2011 – 2015)
• Saarland (Saarland), 4,448 / year (2008 – 11/2015)
• Schleswig-Holstein (Schleswig-Holstein), 18,458 / year (2012 – 2014)
• State of Bremen (Land Bremen), 597 / year (10/2012 – 09/2015)

LiDAR acquisitions are expensive and while it would be interesting to also find out how much each state has actually spent on airborne surveys over the past years (another “Frag den Staat” request anyone?), it is obvious that the reported revenues are just a tiny fraction of those costs. Exact details of the reported revenue per year can be accessed via the links to the information requests above. The cost table of each answer letter is copied below.

However, it’s not all bad news in Germany. Some of you may have seen my happy announcement of the OpenNRW initiative that come January 2017 this would also include the raw LiDAR points. And did it happen? Yes it did! Although the raw LiDAR points are maybe a little tricky to find, they are available for free download and they come with a very permissible license.

The license is called “Datenlizenz Deutschland – Namensnennung – Version 2.0” or “dl-de/by-2-0” and allows data and derivative sharing as well as commercial use. It merely requires you to properly name the source. For the LiDAR you need to list the “Land NRW (2017)” with the year of the download in brackets as the source and specify the data set that was used via the respective Universal Resource Identification (URI) for the DOM and/or the DGM.

The OpenNRW portal now also offers the download of the LiDAR “punktwolke” (German for point cloud).

Follow this link to get to the open data download portal. Now type in “punktwolke” (German for “point cloud”) into the search field and on this January 3rd 2017 that gives me 2 “Ergebnisse” (German for “results”). The LiDAR point cloud representation is a bit unusual by international standards. One link is for the DGM (German for DTM) and the other for the DOM (German for DSM). Both links are eventually leading you to unstructured LiDAR point clouds that are describing these surfaces. But it’s still a little tricky to find them. First click on the “ATOM” links that get you to XML description with meta information and a lot of links for the DTM and the DSM. Somewhere hidden in there you find the actual download links for hundreds of Gigabytes of LiDAR for the entire state of North Rhine-Westphalia (Nordrhein-Westfalen):

• download raw LiDAR points describing the DTM (DGM)
• download raw LiDAR points describing the DSM (DOM)

We download the two smallest zipped files DGM and DOM for the municipality of Wickede (Ruhr) to have a look at the data. The point cloud is in EPSG 5555 which is a compound datum of horizontal EPSG 25832 aka ETRS89 / UTM zone 32N and vertical EPSG 5783 aka the “Deutches Haupthohennetz 1992”.

The contents of the DGM zip file contains multiple files per tile.

The DGM zip file has a total of 212 *.xyz files that list the x, y, and z coordinate for each point in ASCII format. We first compress them and add the EPSG 25832 code with laszip. The compressed LAZ files are less than half the size of the zipped XYZ files. Each file corresponds to a particular square kilometer. The name of each tile contains the lower left coordinate of this square kilometer but there can be multiple files for each square kilometer:

• 14 files with “ab” in the name contain very few points. They look like additional points for under bridges. The “b” is likely for “Brücke” (German for “bridge”).
• 38 files with “ag” in the name contain seem to contain only points in areas where buildings used to cover the terrain but with ground elevation. The “g” is likely for “Gebäude” (German for “building”).
• 30 files with “aw” in the name contain seem to contain only points in areas where there are water bodies but with ground elevation. The “w” is likely for “Wasser” (German for “water”).
• 14 files with “brk” in the name also contain few points. They look like the original bridge point that are replaced by the points in the files with “ab” in the name to flatten the bridges. The “brk” is also likely for “Brücke” (German for “bridge”).
• 42 files with “lpb” in the name. They look like the last return LiDAR points that were classified as ground. The “lpb” is likely for “Letzter Pulse Boden” (German for “last return ground”).
• 42 files with “lpnb” in the name. They look like those last return LiDAR points that were classified as non-ground. The “lpnb” is likely for “Letzter Pulse Nicht Boden” (German for “last return not ground”).
• 32 files with “lpub” in the name contain very few points. They look like the last return points that are too low and were therefore excluded. The “lpub” is likely for “Letzter Pulse Unter Boden” (German for “last return under ground”).

It is left to an exercise to the user for figure out which of those above sets of files should be used for generating a raster DTM. (-: Give us your ideas in the comments. The DOM zip file has a total of 72 *.xyz files. We also compress them and add the EPSG 25832 code with laszip. The compressed LAZ files are less than half the size of the zipped XYZ files. Again there are multiple files for each square kilometer:

• 30 files with “aw” in the name contain seem to contain only points in areas where there are water bodies but with ground elevation. The “w” is likely for “Wasser” (German for “water”).
• 42 files with “fp” in the name. They look like the first return LiDAR points. The “fp” is likely for “Frühester Pulse” (German for “first return”).

If you use all these points from the DOM folder your get the nice DSM shown below … albeit not a spike-free one.

A triangulated first return DSM generated mainly from the file “dom1l-fp_32421_5705_1_nw.laz” with the points from “dom1l-aw_32421_5705_1_nw.laz” for areas with water bodies shown in yellow.

Kudos to OpenNRW for being the first German state to open their LiDAR holdings. Which one of the other 15 German state survey departments will be next to promote their LiDAR as open data. If you are not the last one to do so you can expect to get featured here too … (-;

UPDATE (January 5th): The folks at OpenNRW just tweeted us information about the organization of the zipped archives in the DTM (DGM) and DSM (DOM) folders. We guessed pretty okay which points are in which file but the graphic below (also available here) summarizes it much more nicely and also tells us that “a” was for “ausgefüllt” (German for “filled up”). Maximally two returns per pulse are available: either a single return or a first return plus a last return. There are no intermediate returns, which may be an issue for those interested in vegetation mapping.

Nice illustration of which LiDAR point is in which file. All files with ‘ab’, ‘ag’, or ‘aw’ in the name contain synthetic points that fill up ground areas not properly reached by the laser.

This is the first part of a series on how to process the newly released open LiDAR data for the entire state of North Rhine-Westphalia that was announced a few days ago. Again, kudos to OpenNRW for being the most progressive open data state in Germany. You can follow this tutorial after downloading the latest version of LAStools as well as a pair of DGM and DOM files for your area of interest from these two download pages.

• download raw LiDAR points describing the DTM (DGM)
• download raw LiDAR points describing the DSM (DOM)

We have downloaded the pair of DGM and DOM files for the Federal City of Bonn. Bonn is the former capital of Germany and was host to the FOSS4G 2016 conference. As both files are larger than 10 GB, we use the wget command line tool with option ‘-c’ that will restart where it left off in case the transmission gets interrupted.

The DGM file and the DOM file are zipped archives that contain the points in 1km by 1km tiles stored as x, y, z coordinates in ETRS89 / UTM 32 projection as simple ASCII text with centimeter resolution (i.e. two decimal digits).

>> more dgm1l-lpb_32360_5613_1_nw.xyz
360000.00 5613026.69 164.35
360000.00 5613057.67 164.20
360000.00 5613097.19 164.22
360000.00 5613117.89 164.08
360000.00 5613145.35 164.03
[...]

There is more than one tile for each square kilometer as the LiDAR points have been split into different files based on their classification and their return type. Furthermore there are also synthetic points that were used by the land survey department to replace certain LiDAR points in order to generate higher quality DTM and DSM raster products.

The zipped DGM archive is 10.5 GB in size and contains 956 *.xyz files totaling 43.5 GB after decompression. The zipped DOM archive is 11.5 GB in size and contains 244 *.xyz files totaling 47.8 GB. Repeatedly loading these 90 GB of text data and parsing these human-readable x, y, and z coordinates is inefficient with common LiDAR software. In the first step we convert the textual *.xyz files into binary *.laz files that can be stored, read and copied more efficiently. We do this with the open source LASzip compressor that is distributed with LAStools using these two command line calls:

laszip -i dgm1l_05314000_Bonn_EPSG5555_XYZ\*.xyz ^
       -epsg 25832 -vertical_dhhn92 ^
       -olaz ^
       -cores 2

laszip -i dom1l_05314000_Bonn_EPSG5555_XYZ\*.xyz ^
       -epsg 25832 -vertical_dhhn92 ^
       -olaz ^
       -cores 2

The point coordinates are is in EPSG 5555, which is a compound datum of horizontal EPSG 25832 aka ETRS89 / UTM zone 32N and vertical EPSG 5783 aka the “Deutsches Haupthoehennetz 1992” or DHHN92. We add this information to each *.laz file during the LASzip compression process with the command line options ‘-epsg 25832’ and ‘-vertical_dhhn92’.

LASzip reduces the file size by a factor of 10. The 956 *.laz DGM files compress down to 4.3 GB from 43.5 GB for the original *.xyz files and the 244 *.laz DOM files compress down to 4.8 GB from 47.8 GB. From here on out we continue to work with the 9 GB of slim *.laz files. But before we delete the 90 GB of bulky *.xyz files we make sure that there are no file corruptions (e.g. disk full, truncated files, interrupted processes, bit flips, …) in the *.laz files.

laszip -i dgm1l_05314000_Bonn_EPSG5555_XYZ\*.laz -check

laszip -i dom1l_05314000_Bonn_EPSG5555_XYZ\*.laz -check

One advantage of having the LiDAR in an industry standard such as the LAS format (or its lossless compressed twin, the LAZ format) is that the header of the file stores the number of points per file, the bounding box, as well as the projection information that we have added. This allows us to very quickly load an overview for example, into lasview.

lasview -i dgm1l_05314000_Bonn_EPSG5555_XYZ\*.laz -GUI

The bounding boxes of the DGM files quickly give us an overview in the GUI when the files are in LAS or LAZ format.

Now we want to find a particular site in Bonn such as the World Conference Center Bonn where FOSS4G 2016 was held. Which tile is it in? We need some geospatial context to find it, for example, by creating an overview in form of KML files that we can load into Google Earth. We use the files from the DOM folder with “fp” in the name as points on buildings are mostly “first returns”. See what our previous blog post writes about the different file names if you can not wait for the second part of this series. We can create the KML files with lasboundary either via the GUI or in the command line.

lasboundary -i dom1l_05314000_Bonn_EPSG5555_XYZ\dom1l-fp*.laz ^
            -gui

Only the “fp” tiles from the DOM folder loaded the GUI into lasboundary.

lasboundary -i dom1l_05314000_Bonn_EPSG5555_XYZ\dom1l-fp*.laz ^
            -use_bb -labels -okml

We zoom in and find the World Conference Center Bonn and load the identified tile into lasview. Well, we did not expect this to happen, but what we see below will make this series of tutorials even more worthwhile. There is a lot of “high noise” in the particular tile we picked. We should have noticed the unusually high z range of 406.42 meters in the Google Earth pop-up. Is this high electromagnetic radiation interfering with the sensors? There are a number of high-tech government buildings with all kind of antennas nearby (such as the United Nations Bonn Campus the mouse cursor points at).

Significant amounts of high noise are in the first returns of the DOM tile we picked.

But the intended area of interest was found. You can see the iconic “triangulated” roof of the building that is across from the World Conference Center Bonn.

The World Conference Center Bonn is across from the building with the “triangulated” roof.

Please don’t think it is the responsibility of OpenNRW to remove the noise and provide cleaner data. The land survey has already processed this data into whatever products they needed and that is where their job ended. Any additional services – other than sharing the raw data – are not in their job description. We’ll take care of that … (-:

Acknowledgement: The LiDAR data of OpenNRW comes with a very permissible license. It is called “Datenlizenz Deutschland – Namensnennung – Version 2.0” or “dl-de/by-2-0” and allows data and derivative sharing as well as commercial use. It only requires us to name the source. We need to cite the “Land NRW (2017)” with the year of the download in brackets and specify the Universal Resource Identification (URI) for both the DOM and the DGM. Done. So easy. Thank you, OpenNRW … (-:

Rachel Opitz (recipient of three LASmoons)
Center for Virtualization and Applied Spatial Technologies
Department of Anthropology, University of South Florida, USA

Background:
In Spring 2017 Rachel Opitz will be teaching a course on Remote Sensing for Human Ecology and Archaeology at the University of South Florida. The aim of the course is to provide students with the practical skills and knowledge needed to work with contemporary remote sensing data. The course focuses on airborne laser scanning and hyper-spectral data and their application in Human Ecology and Archaeology. Through the course students will be introduced to a number of software packages commonly used to process and interpret these data, with an emphasis on free and/or open source tools.

Classification parameters and the resolution at which the DTM is interpolated both have a significant impact on our ability to recognize anthropogenic features in the landscape. Here we see a small quarry. More aggressive filtering and a coarser DTM resolution (left) makes it difficult to recognize that this is a quarry. Less aggressive filtering and a higher resolution (right) leaves some vegetation behind, but makes the edges of the quarry and some in-situ blocks clearly visible.

Goal:
The students will develop practical skills in applied remote sensing through hands-on exercises. Learning to assess, manage and process large data sets is essential. In particular, the students in the course will learn to:
+ Identify the set of techniques needed to solve a problem in applied remote sensing
+ Find public imagery and specify acquisitions
+ Assess data quality
+ Process airborne LiDAR data
+ Combine complementary remote sensing data sources
+ Create effective data visualizations
+ Analyze digital topographic and spectral data to answer questions in human ecology and archaeology

Data:
The course will include case studies that draw on a variety of publicly available data sets that will all be used in the exercises:
+ the PNOA data from Spain
+ data held by NOAA
+ data collected using NASA’s GLiHT platform

LAStools processing:
LAStools will be used throughout the course, as students learn to assess the quality of LiDAR data, classify raw LiDAR point clouds, create raster terrain and canopy models, and produce visualizations. The online tutorials and videos available via the company website and the over 50 hours of video on YouTube as well as the LAStools user forum will be used as resources during the course.