Eliminating the effect of overlapping crowns from aerial inventory estimates
When a forest stand is inventoried from aerial photographs or with the use of laser scanners, only those trees that are not covered by a crown of a taller tree can be observed. This means that the probability of a tree being observable from the air depends on its relative height among the trees in the stand and on the crown areas of the taller trees. This study derives a mathematical formula for the probability of a tree being observable from the air according to certain assumptions about the censoring process in a forest stand where trees are randomly located without spatial autocorrelation in tree size. After presenting this formula, different approaches are proposed for the correction of the censoring effect upon the observed distribution of crown areas. The methods could change the aim of individual-tree recognition from finding all trees of the stand to finding a set of trees for which the stated assumptions about the censoring process are valid as far as possible. The methods performed well in a demonstration with simulated, error-free data sets, for which all stated assumptions were valid.