2024 Hybrid Operational Lidar Inventory & Growth Model User’s Group (GMUG) Meeting

Operational Lidar Inventory Meeting – April 9

8:30 am Building Opens / Coffee Available

8:55 – 9:10 am Welcome and Introduction (Jacob Strunk, USFS)

9:10 – 9:35 am Estimation of Wildfire Biomass Consumption with Digital Aerial Photogrammetry (Bryce Frank, USFS)

9:35 – 10 am Estimation of Site Index from Bi-Temporal Lidar Data (Dan Opalach, FBRI)

10 – 10:15 am Break

10:15 – 10:45 am Site Index Discussion (Breakout Groups)

10:45 – 11:10 am Drone Multispectral Point Cloud Based Fire Severity Mapping (Jonathan Batchelor, UW)

11:10 – 11:35 am Terrestrial, Mobile, and Aerial Lidar Comparison for Alaska Forest Inventory (Rachel Deininger, PFC-UW)

11:35 am – 12 pm GNSS Accuracy (Jacob Strunk, USFS)

12 pm Lunch (provided)

12:45 – 1:10 pm Integrating NAIP 3D into Forest Structure and Composition Mapping (Dave Bell, USFS)

1:10 – 1:35 pm Lidar Tree Canopy Cover Normalization (Demetrios Gatziolis, USFS)

1:35 pm Break

1:50 – 2:15 pm Tree- and Forest-Level Fuels from Lidar (Mike Parlow and Cam Brown, Forsite)

2:15 – 2:50 pm Fuels / Fire Severity Discussion (Breakout Groups)

2:50 – 3:15 pm Dealing with Species in Canada Projects (Ian Moss, ForesTree)

3:15 pm Break

3:30 – 3:55 pm Large-Area Forest Census with MLS (Eli Jensen, Ironwood Forestry)

3:55 – 4:20 pm Geiger-Mode Lidar Redux: Canopy Penetration, Stem Segmentation, and Measurement (Ed Flathers, UIdaho)

4:20 – 4:30 pm Wrap-up and Closing (Jacob Strunk, USFS)

Growth Model User’s Group Meeting – April 10

09:00 – 09:30 am  Logistics and Introductions

• • Moderator, Weikko Jaross (LandVest)
  • Venue – Western Forestry and Conservation Association – Nicole Jacobsen
  • Introductions

9:30 – 10:30 am    Panel Discussion The challenges and opportunities with “No Tree Left Behind”

GMUG 2024 engages luminaries of growth modeling and trailblazers of inventory modeling to discuss the past, present, and future of growth modeling. Invited participants include:

Mark Castle (USFS – FVS Group)

Greg Johnson (GJ Biometrics, LLC)

Dan Opalach (FBRI)

Aaron Weiskittel (University of Maine)

Ben Rice (Midgard Natural Resources)

David Marshall (Biometrician Emeritus)

Jacob Strunk (USFS)

Bruce Ripley (University of Idaho)

10:30 am – 12:00 pm (3)           Growth Model Updates (30-Minutes Each)

Forest Projection System: FBRI Updates – Dan Opalach (Forest Biometrics Research Institute) Dan and the FBRI team have been busy with publishing and applied research projects with promising applications. Dan will review FBRI accomplishments in 2023 and important FPS developments in the works.

FVS – Mark Castle (Forest Vegetation Simulator Group, USFS)

The FVS Group focused on training and support in 2023. Mark will give us an update of the group’s staffing, trends in their services, and their aspirations for 2024 and beyond.

Refitting FVS diameter growth equations across multiple ecoregions (David Diaz, UofW)

The Forest Vegetation Simulator currently employs a diverse variety of growth equations for each tree species in each ecoregion. David will discuss the opportunity to simplify and consolidate FVS diameter growth equations along with methods to fit them simultaneously across regions by feeding FIA data to a hierarchical Bayesian state-space model.

12:00 – 1:00 pm    Lunch (Hosted)

Center for Advanced Forestry Systems-CAFS Nathaniel Naumann (PotlatchDeltic)

Nathaniel, Co-Chair of CAFS Industry Advisory Board will provide an overview of the program and call for national level collaborations in research and development.

1:00 – 2:30 pm (3)  Data Processing Tools, Model I/O (30-minute each)

TreeMap, FIA, and FVS. Rachel Houtman (USFS Missoula Fire Sciences Laboratory). This talk explores TreeMap as a spatially-explicit model of carbon biomass.  Using the HJ Andrews Experimental Forest as a case example, TreeMap identifies the most-similar FIA plots for each 30m pixel. FVS can then be used to project carbon biomass from FIADB and remap these results to their correlated pixels with TreeMap.

A stand-level evaluation of FVS growth projections for a LiDAR Forest inventory – Jacob Strunk, (US Forest Service) and Peter Gould (Mason Bruce & Girard). Jacob or Peter will present their Savannah River Site project in South Carolina where they applied a kNN imputation of field plots to LiDAR to produce a tree list type inventory for growth modeling. They compare their results of FVS modeling using the LiDAR vs. Field plot inputs to FVS.

Developing Tree Lists for REGEN3 – Bernard Issacson (USFS Southern Research Station)

Using BigMap and field plots, Bernard is investigating methods for producing tree lists inputs to REGEN3 and FVS in the USFS Northern and Southern regions.

Open Discussion:  Data Processing, Q&A (Weikko Jaross Moderator)

2:30 – 2:45 pm   Break

2:45 – 3:45 pm (2)  Topics of Interest (30-Minutes Each)

Acadian Model – Greg Johnson (GJ Biometrics LLC)

The Acadian Region of Maine is characterized by extensively managed naturally regenerated forests comprised of mixed species and multicohort structures in a complex of topography, soil parent material, and climatic zones. Greg’s will provide a sneak peek into updating the underlying models of the Acadian growth model.

CIPSANON Updates– Doug Mainwaring (Center for Intensive Planted-forest Silviculture)

Doug and crew have been busy in the field and lab this year. Doug will brief us on updates and the future for CIPSANON.

3:45 – 4:00 pm Closing & Wrap-up (Weikko Jaross Moderator)

• • Words from our GMUG 2024 sponsor (LandVest)
  • Feedback on agenda and venue
  • Growth Model Run-Off (HJ Andrews Experimental State Forest dataset)
  • When next to meet again?