This special issue contains six papers on emerging quantitative methods for handling missing data in forest ecology and management. The papers exemplify that imputation methods can combine remote sensing and field data, models extend observations across space and time, and current research methods...

Photogrammetric point clouds obtained with unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) have emerged as an alternative source of remotely sensed data for small area forest management inventories (FMI). Nonetheless, it is often overlooked that small area FMI require considerable field data in addition to UAS...

Drone applications are becoming increasingly common in the arena of forest management and forest inventories. In particular, the use of photogrammetrically derived drone-based image point clouds (DIPC) in individual tree detection has become popular. Use of an area-based approach (ABA) in small...

Forest management inventories (FMIs) provide critical information, usually at the stand level, for forest management planning. A typical FMI includes (i) the delineation of the inventory area to stands by applying auxiliary information; (ii) the classification of the stands according to categorical ...

Airborne Laser Scanning (ALS) results in point-wise measurements of canopy height, which can further be used for Individual Tree Detection (ITD). However, ITD cannot find all trees because small trees can hide below larger tree crowns. Here we discuss methods where the plot totals and means of...

Most forest growth studies using airborne laser scanning (ALS) consider how the changes in forest attributes are observed in repeated ALS data acquisitions, but the prediction of future forest growth from ALS data is still a rarely discussed topic. This study examined the prediction of the periodic ...

Compared with traditional inventory methods based on field plot sampling, airborne laser scanning (ALS) has the potential to assess forest structural properties with greater detail over space and time and at lower cost. Many national ALS survey programmes covering entire countries for topographic...

Background: The aim of this study was to construct a nationwide stand age model by using National Forest Inventory (NFI) data and nationwide airborne laser scanning (ALS) data. In plantation forestry, age is usually known. While this is not the case in boreal managed forests, age is still seldom...

Today, forest scenario analyses often require spatially comprehensive data. This is due to increasing needs to provide broad-scale descriptions of the consequences of different forest management regimes, encompassing issues with a clear spatial dimension such as biodiversity and recreation. Thus,...

This study examines the alternatives to include crown base height (CBH) predictions in operational forest inventories based on airborne laser scanning (ALS) data. We studied 265 field sample plots in a strongly pine-dominated area in northeastern Finland. The CBH prediction alternatives used...