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Estimating canopy rugosity from terrestrial LiDAR

DATE: 2021-01-01

AUTHOR: John L. Godlee

As part of my PhD research I have been using terrestrial LiDAR to understand woodland tree canopy traits in southern African savannas. One of the measurements I wanted to make was an estimate of the roughness of the top of the canopy. I've also heard this referred to as the canopy rugosity. In a previous post I've already described how I processed the raw point cloud data to produce a .csv with XYZ point coordinates, so I'll skip straight to how I used R to estimate canopy rugosity.

After reading in the file with data.table::fread() the first thing was to assign each point to a 10x10cm 2D bin in the XY plane, then I took the 95th percentile, 99th percentile, and maximum point height within each bin:

dat <- fread(x)

# Assign each point to a 2D bin, 
# 10x10 cm bins
dat_xy_bin <- dat %>% 
mutate(
  bin_x = cut(.$X, include.lowest = TRUE, labels = FALSE,
    breaks = seq(floor(min(.$X)), ceiling(max(.$X)), by = xy_width)),
  bin_y = cut(.$Y, include.lowest = TRUE, labels = FALSE,
    breaks = seq(floor(min(.$Y)), ceiling(max(.$Y)), by = xy_width)))

# Quantiles of height in each bin
dat_xy_bin_summ <- dat_xy_bin %>%
group_by(bin_x, bin_y) %>%
summarise(
  q95 = quantile(Z, 0.95),
  q99 = quantile(Z, 0.99),
  max = max(Z, na.rm = TRUE)
  )

Then I extracted a number of simple descriptive statistics from the distributions of values (q95, q99, max) across each XY bin:

# Calculate mean, median, stdev of distribution (canopy top rugosity)
summ <- dat_xy_bin_summ %>%
ungroup() %>%
summarise(across(c(q95, q99, max), 
    list(
      max = ~max(.x, na.rm = TRUE),
      min = ~min(.x, na.rm = TRUE),
      mean = ~mean(.x, na.rm = TRUE), 
      median = ~median(.x, na.rm = TRUE),
      sd = ~sd(.x, na.rm = TRUE),
      range = ~max(.x, na.rm = TRUE) - min(.x, na.rm = TRUE),
      cov = ~sd(.x, na.rm = TRUE) / mean(.x, na.rm = TRUE) * 100,
      median_max_ratio = ~median(.x, na.rm = TRUE) / max(.x, na.rm = TRUE),
      mode_bin = ~as.numeric(
        gsub("]", "", 
          gsub(".*,", "", 
            names(sort(table(cut(.x, 
                    seq(floor(min(.x)), 
                      ceiling(max(.x)), by = xy_width))), 
                decreasing = TRUE)[1]))))
      ))) %>%
gather() %>% 
mutate(plot_id = plot_id) %>%
dplyr::select(plot_id, key, value) %>%
bind_rows(., 
  data.frame(plot_id = plot_id, key = "entropy", 
    value = enl(dat$Z, z_width)))

Finally I made a histogram of the canopy top distribution, and a surface plot of the canopy height surface:

# Histogram of distribution
pdf(file = file.path("../img/canopy_height_hist", 
  paste0(plot_id, "_canopy_height_hist.pdf")), width = 12, height = 8)
print(
ggplot() + 
geom_histogram(data = dat_xy_bin_summ, aes(x = q99), binwidth = xy_width,
  fill = "grey", colour = "black") +
geom_vline(data = summ[summ$key %in% c("q99_mode_bin", "q99_mean", "q99_median"),], 
  aes(xintercept = value, colour = key), 
  size = 1.5) + 
theme_bw()
)
dev.off()

# Surface plot of canopy height surface
pdf(file = file.path("../img/canopy_height_surface", 
  paste0(plot_id, "_canopy_height_surface.pdf")), width = 12, height = 12)
print(
ggplot() + 
  geom_tile(data = dat_xy_bin_summ, 
    aes(x = bin_x, y = bin_y, fill = q99)) + 
  scale_fill_scico(palette = "bamako") + 
  theme_bw() + 
  coord_equal()
)
dev.off()

Canopy top 99th percentile histogram

Canopy top surface plot