Maximizing the utility of Scotland’s National LiDAR Scan: A Review of Data and Code Available from the Centre for Landscape Regeneration

Airborne LiDAR is a powerful tool for landscape mapping of environmental features. However, many off-the-shelf processing algorithms do not perform well in complex ecosystems, especially for features that are small or under dense forest canopies. This report summarises work compiled by the Centre for Landscape Regeneration (CLR) led by the University of Cambridge, which has produced several new LiDAR processing pipelines for mapping vegetation and landscape features. Many of these pipelines are developed based on a LiDAR dataset collected in the Cairngorms National Park, so they are specifically applicable for Scottish land covers. The main pipelines effectively map shrub height, deadwood, and young colonising trees at landscape scale. Supporting algorithms extract a range of vegetation and geomorphological attributes. Several of these pipelines have been developed into software packages and are readily deployable to upcoming LiDAR datasets. Products of these pipelines support downstream applications, including habitat quality assessments, carbon stock estimations, fire risk modelling, and hydrological analyses. A detailed account of how these pipelines fit with proposed work in the Scottish land LiDAR programme can be found at the end of the document.