New Opportunities for Forest Remote Sensing Through Ultra-High-Density Drone Lidar.

Current and planned space missions will produce aboveground biomass density data products at varying spatial resolution. Calibration and validation of these data products is critically dependent on the existence of field estimates of aboveground biomass and coincident remote sensing data from airborne or terrestrial lidar. There are few places that meet these requirements, and they are mostly in the northern hemisphere and temperate zone. Here we summarize the potential for low-altitude drones to produce new observations in support of mission science. We describe technical requirements for producing high-quality measurements from autonomous platforms and highlight differences among commercially available laser scanners and drone aircraft. We then describe a case study using a heavy-lift autonomous helicopter in a temperate mountain forest in the southern Czech Republic in support of calibration and validation activities for the NASA Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation. Low-altitude flight using drones enables the collection of ultra-high-density point clouds using wider laser scan angles than have been possible from traditional airborne platforms. These measurements can be precise and accurate and can achieve measurement densities of thousands of points · m