CREATING A VIRTUAL TROPICAL FOREST FROM THREE‐DIMENSIONAL AERIAL IMAGERY TO ESTIMATE CARBON STOCKS

Given the interest in implementing land-use change and forestry projects for mitigating carbon dioxide emissions, there is potentially a large demand for a system to measure carbon stocks accurately and precisely in a cost-effective manner. As terrestrial ecosystems tend to be heterogeneous, a large number of sample plots could be needed to attain the regulatory-required levels of precision, thus resulting in a costly process. A potential way of reducing costs of measuring the carbon stocks of forests is to collect the key data remotely. We have designed a system (a multispectral three-dimensional aerial digital imagery system, M3DADI) that collects high-resolution overlapping stereo imagery (≤10 cm pixels) from which we can distinguish individual trees or shrubs. In essence, we created a virtual forest that we used to measure crown area and heights of all plant groups. We used this M3DADI system to estimate the carbon stocks in aboveground biomass for the pine savanna in the Rio Bravo Carbon Sequestratio...