Modelling vegetation understory cover using LiDAR metrics

Forest understory vegetation is an important feature of wildlife habitat among other things. Predicting and mapping understory is a critical need for forest management and conservation planning, but it has proved difficult. LiDAR has the potential to generate remotely sensed forest understory structure data, yet this potential has to be fully validated. Our objective was to examine the capacity of LiDAR point cloud data to predict forest understory cover. We modeled ground-based observations of understory structure in three vertical strata (0.5 m to