Mapping Forest Infrastructure – Comparing Different Data Acquisition Techniques

Forest resource information usually change over time, what is monitored by
forest inventories using different methods. Forest infrastructures, such like
roads, hydrographic network, other linear facilities are relatively stable in
time. Nevertheless, conventional forest inventories in Lithuania map forest
infrastructures every time the survey of forest resources takes place. Assuming,
that different and rapidly developing forest stand inventory techniques
are applied each time, there are significant changes in location of forest infrastructures
observed. Repeated inventories of such objects usually assume
increased inventory costs and introduce significant disorder when aiming for
permanent forest management. This study investigates the opportunities of
different data acquisition techniques for mapping relatively stable over time
forest infrastructure objects. We compare classification and geometric accuracies
of forest infrastructures achieved using (i) ground geodetic survey, (ii)
available from state maintained geo-referenced background database, which
has been created using interpretation of aerial images, (iii) extracted from 3D
airborne laser scanning point clouds and (iv) very high-resolution World-
View-1 satellite images. The key finding is that costly and time-consuming
ground data collection approaches may be successfully substituted by remote
sensing based data collection, which delivers compatible data contents for
significantly lower costs.