—Andrew Lister, USDA Forest Service
The USDA Forest Service's Forest Inventory and Analysis Program (FIA) collects information on the country's forest resource. By collecting information on a continuous basis on a nationwide network of ground plots, generating estimates of forest inventory attributes, and analyzing and reporting results, FIA helps characterize and monitor trends in the Nation's forests. LIDAR data, or elevation measurements derived from measurements made with an airborne laser imaging system, can be used to enhance FIA measurements and estimation methods. The current talk will present results of a characterization of the spatial and structural relationships between FIA data and LIDAR point cloud metrics for an area of Ohio, which contains wall-to-wall LIDAR coverage. Esri's ArcGIS was used for data integration and other spatial analyses.