Mapping Vegetation Volume in Urban Environments by Fusing LiDAR and Multispectral Data

Urban forests provide great ecosystem services to population in metropolitan areas even though they occupy little green space in a huge gray landscape. Unfortunately, urbanization inherently results in threatening the green infrastructure, and the recent urbanization trends drew great attention of scientists and policy makers on how to preserve or restore green infrastructure in metropolitan area. For this reason, mapping the spatial distribution of the green infrastructure is important in urban environments since the resulting map helps us identify hot green spots and set up long term plan on how to preserve or restore green infrastructure in urban environments. As a preliminary step for mapping green infrastructure utilizing multi-source remote sensing data in urban environments, the objective of this study is to map vegetation volume by fusing LiDAR and multispectral data in urban environments. Multispectral imageries are used to identify the two dimensional distribution of green infrastructure, while LiDAR data are utilized to characterize the vertical structure of the identified green structure. Vegetation volume was calculated over the metropolitan Chicago city area, and the vegetation volume was summarized over 16 NLCD classes. The experimental results indicated that vegetation volume varies greatly even in the same land cover class, and traditional land cover map based above ground biomass estimation approach may introduce bias in the estimation results.