Project Description

Forest ecosystems contribute $17 billion annually to the economy of Indiana through forest products, and $200 billion to the national economy. Forest industries support nearly one million jobs nationally. Accurate measurement of forest characteristics is essential for sustainable management of forests to meet both economic and ecological needs. Nevertheless, many forest measurement techniques in use today rely on manual sampling methods and tools developed decades ago. Recent technological advances offer new tools and techniques, such as LiDAR, with the potential to transform forestry industries through improved accuracy, automation, and efficiency of forest measurements. The desired outcome of this project is a user-friendly analytical tool that can ingest a wide-variety of LiDAR point cloud datasets and generate the information on forest structure, health, and quality that is essential to the success of forest industries in the 21st century. 

Start Date

Spring/Summer 2019

Postdoc Qualifications

We seek applicants to participate in a project that will develop automated processing workflows and analytical algorithms to derive essential forest structural information from point clouds generated using LiDAR systems deployed on terrestrial, aerial, and satellite platforms. The successful applicant will have expertise in some combination of the following areas: programming (R and Matlab preferred), software engineering, remote sensing, statistics, and/or point cloud processing.  

Co-advisors

Dr. Ayman Habib (Primary Advisor)
ahabib@purdue.edu
https://engineering.purdue.edu/CE/Academics/Groups/Geomatics/DPRG/People
Professor of Civil Engineering 
Purdue University

Dr. Brady Hardiman (Co-Advisor)
bhardima@purdu.edu
https://www.purdue.edu/fnr/sites/hardiman/
Assistant Professor of Forestry and Natural Resources, Environmental and Ecological Engineering
Purdue University 

References

1. Multi-Class Simultaneous Adaptive Segmentation and Quality Control of Point Cloud Data http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/8/2/104/htm

2. Observing ecosystems with lightweight, rapid‐scanning terrestrial lidar scanners
https://zslpublications.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/rse2.26

3. Terrestrial Laser Scanning for Plot-Scale Forest Measurement
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40725-015-0025-5

4. The role of canopy structural complexity in wood net primary production of a maturing northern deciduous forest
https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1890/10-2192.1

5. Quantifying vegetation and canopy structural complexity from terrestrial LiDAR data using the forestr r package
https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/2041-210X.13061