Structural diversity is a key feature of forest ecosystems that influences ecosystem functions from local to macroscales. The ability to measure structural diversity in forests with varying ecological composition and management history across scales can improve the understanding of how to manage forest structure to promote healthy ecosystem functions. Terrestrial LiDAR has often been used to provide detailed characterization of structural diversity at local scales, but it is largely unknown whether these same structural features are detectable using aerial LiDAR that are available across larger spatial scales. We used univariate and multivariate analyses to quantify cross-compatibility of structural diversity metrics derived from terrestrial versus aerial LiDAR on seven National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) sites across the eastern USA.
Results/Conclusions
We found strong univariate agreement between terrestrial and aerial LiDAR metrics of canopy height, canopy cover, openness, internal heterogeneity, and leaf area, but found marginal agreement between metrics of canopy external heterogeneity. Terrestrial and aerial LiDAR both demonstrated the ability to distinguish forest sites from structural diversity metrics in multivariate space, but terrestrial LiDAR was able to resolve finer-scale detail within sites. Our results indicated that structural diversity derived from high-resolution, localized terrestrial LiDAR can be scaled up with low-resolution, wide-coverage aerial LiDAR across a range forest types at a sub-continental scale, allowing the study of critical ecosystem functions at macroscales with aerial LiDAR derived structural diversity metrics.