Diameter, height and species of 42 million trees in three European landscapes generated from field data and airborne laser scanning data

Raphaël Aussenac; Jean-Matthieu Monnet; Matija Klopčič; Paweł Hawryło; Jarosław Socha; Mats Mahnken; Martin Gutsch; Thomas Cordonnier; Patrick Vallet

doi:10.12688/openreseurope.15373.2

Diameter, height and species of 42 million trees in three European landscapes generated from field data and airborne laser scanning data

Open Res Eur. 2023 Dec 5:3:32. doi: 10.12688/openreseurope.15373.2. eCollection 2023.

Authors

Raphaël Aussenac^{1

2

3}, Jean-Matthieu Monnet¹, Matija Klopčič⁴, Paweł Hawryło⁵, Jarosław Socha⁵, Mats Mahnken⁶, Martin Gutsch⁶, Thomas Cordonnier^{1

7}, Patrick Vallet¹

Affiliations

¹ Université Grenoble Alpes, INRAE, LESSEM, 2 rue de la Papeterie-BP 76, F-38402 St-Martin-d'Hères, France.
² Forêts et Sociétés, Université de Montpellier, CIRAD, Montpellier, France.
³ CIRAD, UPR Forêts et Sociétés, Yamoussoukro, Cote d'Ivoire.
⁴ University of Ljubljana, Biotechnical Faculty, Department of Forestry and Renewable Forest Resources, Jamnikarjeva 101, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia.
⁵ Department of Forest Resources Management, Faculty of Forestry, University of Agriculture in Krakow, Al. 29 Listopada 46, 31-425 Krakow, Poland.
⁶ Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), Member of the Leibniz Association, Telegrafenberg, 14473 Potsdam, Germany.
⁷ Office National des Forêts, Département Recherche Développement Innovation, Direction Territoriale Bourgogne-Franche-Comté, 21 rue du Muguet, 39100 Dole, France.

Abstract

Ecology and forestry sciences are using an increasing amount of data to address a wide variety of technical and research questions at the local, continental and global scales. However, one type of data remains rare: fine-grain descriptions of large landscapes. Yet, this type of data could help address the scaling issues in ecology and could prove useful for testing forest management strategies and accurately predicting the dynamics of ecosystem services. Here we present three datasets describing three large European landscapes in France, Poland and Slovenia down to the tree level. Tree diameter, height and species data were generated combining field data, vegetation maps and airborne laser scanning (ALS) data following an area-based approach. Together, these landscapes cover more than 100 000 ha and consist of more than 42 million trees of 51 different species. Alongside the data, we provide here a simple method to produce high-resolution descriptions of large landscapes using increasingly available data: inventory and ALS data. We carried out an in-depth evaluation of our workflow including, among other analyses, a leave-one-out cross validation. Overall, the landscapes we generated are in good agreement with the landscapes they aim to reproduce. In the most favourable conditions, the root mean square error (RMSE) of stand basal area (BA) and mean quadratic diameter (Dg) predictions were respectively 5.4 m ².ha ^-1 and 3.9 cm, and the generated main species corresponded to the observed main species in 76.2% of cases.

Keywords: airborne laser scanning; downscaling; forest; inventory; landscape; tree-level.

Grants and funding

This research was financially supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the grant agreement No 773324 (ForestValue - Innovating forest-based bioeconomy [ForestValue]). This work was carried out within the framework of the I-Maestro project, supported under the umbrella of ERA-NET Cofund ForestValue by ADEME (FR), FNR (DE), MIZS (SI), NCN (PL). This work was also supported by the GRAINE program of ADEME (FR) in the framework of the PROTEST project (convention n°1703C0069).