Assessment of generalized allometric models for aboveground biomass estimation: A case study in Australia

Abstract This paper aims to assess the performance of generalized aboveground biomass (AGB) allometric models in the Australian context by investigating the correlation between the AGB estimates and the lidar-based individual tree parameters. A hybrid tree segmentation algorithm is proposed to segment an airborne lidar point cloud into individual trees. Although the diameter at breast height (DBH) of a tree is a crucial parameter for the AGB estimation, a typical airborne lidar data contains only a few points representing partial DBH, hence a localized DBH regression model is proposed. Principal component analysis is applied to examine the multicollinearity in the input variables and ridge regression is applied to remove the less important variables. Four machine learning techniques, namely random forest, support vector regression, multilayer perceptron and radial basis function, are applied to generate AGB regression models. The qualities of the calibrated AGB models are assessed by calculating the adjusted-coefficient-of-determination, leave-one-out cross-validation, the Akaike information criterion, normalized-mean-square-error and the model efficiency index. The test results indicate that the random forest-based AGB model outperforms other machine learning techniques. It is concluded that, if the environmental conditions of tree samples resemble the study region, the generalized AGB allometric model would perform well with the tree samples regardless of their geographical context.