Assessing the potential for leaf-off LiDAR data to model canopy closure in temperate deciduous forests

Estimates of canopy closure have many important uses in forest management and ecological research. Field measurements, however, are typically not practical to acquire over expansive areas or for large numbers of locations. This problem has been addressed, in recent years, through the use of airborne light detection and ranging (LiDAR) technology which has proven effective in modeling canopy closure remotely. The techniques developed to use LiDAR for this purpose have been designed and evaluated for datasets acquired during leaf-on conditions. However, a large number of LiDAR datasets are acquired during leaf-off conditions since their primary purpose is to generate bare-earth Digital Elevation Models. In this paper, we develop and evaluate techniques for leveraging small-footprint leaf-off LiDAR data to model leaf-on canopy closure in temperate deciduous forests. We evaluate three techniques for modeling canopy closure: (1) the canopy-to-total-return-ratio (CTRR), (2) the canopy-to-total-pixel-ratio (CTPR), and (3) the hemispherical-viewshed (HV). The first technique has been used widely, in various forms, and has been shown to be effective with leaf-on LiDAR datasets. The CTRR technique that we tested uses the first-return LiDAR data only. The latter two techniques are new contributions that we develop and present in this paper. These techniques use Canopy Height Models (CHM) to detect significant gaps in the forest canopy which are of primary importance in estimating closure. The techniques we tested each showed good promise for predicting canopy closure using leaf-off LiDAR data with the CTPR and HV models having particularly high correlations with closure estimates from hemispherical photographs. The CTRR model had performance on par with results from previous studies that used leaf-on LiDAR, although, with leaf-off data the model tended to be negatively biased with respect to species having simple and compound leaf types and positively biased for coniferous species. The CTPR and HV models also showed some slight negative biases for compound-leaf species. The biases for the CTPR and HV models were mitigated when the CHM data were smoothed to fill in small gaps. The CHM-based models were robust to changes in the CHM model resolution which suggests that these methods may be applicable to a variety of small-footprint LiDAR datasets. In this research, the new CTPR and HV methods showed a strong ability to predict canopy closure using leaf-off data, however, future work will be needed to test the applicability of the models to variations in LiDAR datasets, forest types, and topography.