LiDAR mapping of canopy gaps in continuous cover forests: A comparison of canopy height model and point cloud based techniques
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
In continuous cover forest systems, canopy gaps are created by management activities with an aim of encouraging natural regeneration and of increasing structural heterogeneity. Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) may provide a more accurate means to assess gap distribution than ground survey, allowing more effective monitoring. This paper presents a new approach to gap delineation, based on identifying gaps directly from the point cloud and avoiding the need for interpolation of returns to a canopy height model (CHM). Areas of canopy are identified through local maxima identification, filtering and clustering of the point cloud, with gaps subsequently delineated in a GIS environment. When compared to field surveyed gap outlines, the algorithm has an overall accuracy of 88% for data with a high LiDAR point density (11.4 returns per m2) and accuracy of up to 77% for lower density data (1.2 returns per m2). The method provides an increase in overall and Producer's accuracy of 4 and 8% respectively, over a method based on the use of a CHM. The estimation of total gap area is improved by, on average, 16% over the CHM based approach. Results indicate that LiDAR data can be used accurately to delineate gaps in managed forests, potentially allowing more accurate and spatially explicit modelling of understorey light conditions.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it