Piotr Tompalski

• PhD
• Research Scientist at Natural Resources Canada

Forest aboveground biomass (AGB) is an important attribute informing on carbon storage, forest function, and habitat condition. Accurate knowledge of current AGB and its dynamics is essential for sustainable forest management and carbon monitoring. Common methods for estimating AGB, such as permanent sample plots, yield curves, or simulations, ofte...

Forest inventory practices in Canada have evolved over time with changes in forest management priorities, advances in technology, fluctuations in the marketplace, societal expectations, and generational shifts in the workforce. Provincial and territorial governments in Canada are vested with forest management responsibilities and each jurisdiction...

Tree ring width (TRW) is crucial for assessing biomass increments, carbon uptake, forest productivity, and forest health. Due to the limitations involved in measuring TRW, utilizing canopy attributes based on vegetation indices (VIs) offers a promising alternative. This study investigated the species-specific relationship between the VIs derived fr...

In 2012, A Blueprint for Forest Carbon Science in Canada: 2012–2020 was published to guide policy and research and to support Canada's obligations for climate change mitigation and adaptation, sustainable forest management, and international reporting. Over the past decade, the body of scientific research focused on forest carbon dynamics in Canada...

Timely and detailed inventories of forest resources are of critical importance to guiding sustainable forest management decisions. As forests occur across large spatial extents, remotely sensed data are often used to augment conventional forest inventory measurements. When combined with field plot measurements, airborne laser scanning (ALS) data ca...

Texture, soil organic matter (SOM), and soil depth (SoD) are crucial properties in forest management because they can supply spatial information on forest site productivity and guide fertilizer applications. However, soil properties possess an inherent uncertainty that must be mapped to enhance decision making in management applications. Most digit...

This Blueprint outlines the forest carbon science priorities needed to support policy over the next decade. The science priorities were developed in collaboration with the forest carbon science and policy communities across Canada (governments, universities, environmental groups, and industry associations).

Riparian areas are an integral component of the forest hydrologic system. However, systematic management and conservation of riparian vegetation remains a challenge when the extent and nature of riparian vegetation is not easily characterized. Thus, describing riparian vegetation structural attributes and mapping riparian extent is important for st...

Forest inventories provide information regarding the status of a range of attributes as well as enabling predictive applications. Growth and yield models are essential tools for sustainable forest management, importantly enabling projections of future forest conditions (such as height growth). To select the most appropriate growth trajectory, site...

Instream wood is a critical component of proper aquatic ecosystem function. The accurate detection and mapping of instream wood is of key importance for sustainable forest management due to the impact that instream wood features have on stream morphology, sediment distribution, and habitat availability for numerous aquatic species. The increasing a...

Establishing field inventories can be labor intensive, logistically challenging and expensive. Optimizing a sample to derive accurate forest attribute predictions is a key management-level inventory objective. Traditional sampling designs involving pre-defined, interpreted strata could result in poor selection of within-strata sampling intensities,...

The Canadian Wood Fibre Centre (CWFC) of the Canadian Forest Service is working with other federal organizations in Canada, FPInnovations, and provincial, industrial, and academic partners to develop enhanced forest inventory systems that incorporate airborne laser scanning (ALS), digital aerial photogrammetry (DAP), terrestrial laser scanning (TLS...

Representing the spatial distribution of trees and competition interactions in growth models improves growth prediction and provides insights into spatially explicit forecasts for precise silvicultural interventions. However, this information is rarely taken into account over large areas because obtaining the spatial distribution of individual tree...

When combining multi-temporal airborne laser scanning (ALS) data sets, forest height growth assessments can be compromised due to variations in ALS acquisitions. Herein, we demonstrate the importance of assessing and harmonizing the vertical alignment of multi-temporal ALS data sets used for height growth calculations. Using four ALS acquisitions (...

Accurate growth and yield projection for plantations is critical for evaluating management decisions and anticipating future yields. Development of site index (SI) models is often costly and can be problematic when new, short-rotation species are introduced, for example, hybrid poplar plantations, which are increasingly common due to their very fas...

Accepted by the Canadian Journal of Forest Research but not published yet. I will update this with the published article when available. Abstract: Accurate growth and yield projection for plantations is critical for evaluating management decisions and anticipating future yields. Development of site index (SI) models is often costly and can be pro...

Forestry inventory update is a critical component of sustainable forest management, requiring both the spatially explicit identification of forest cover change and integration of sampled or modelled components like growth and regeneration. Contemporary inventory data demands are shifting, with an increased focus on accurate attribute estimation via...

Understanding changes in salmonid populations and their habitat is a critical issue given changing climate, their importance as a keystone species, and their cultural significance. Terrain features such as slope, gradient, and morphology, as well as forest structure attributes including canopy cover, height, and presence of on ground coarse wood, a...

Airborne laser scanning (ALS) has emerged as a technology capable of generating descriptors of vegetation structure and best available terrain information. Research and operational implementations of ALS data have highlighted their value for characterizing forest structure and generating spatially explicit and objective spatial coverages and mappin...

Light detection and ranging (lidar) data acquired from airborne or spaceborne platforms have revolutionized measurement and mapping of forest attributes. Airborne data are often either acquired using multiple overlapped flight lines to provide complete coverage of an area of interest, or using transects to sample a given population. Spaceborne lida...

Increasing atmospheric nitrogen deposition and climate change are considered the main factors accelerating the long-term growth of forests. Quantification of changes in growth rate can be extremely useful in monitoring and assessing the impact of climate change on site productivity. In this study, we carried out a country-wide analysis of long-term...

Quality information on forest resources is fundamental for sustainable forest management. Manual aerial photointerpretation is used as a cost-effective source of data for forest inventories; however, the process of photointerpretation is inherently subjective and is often undertaken by multiple photointerpreters for a given forest management area....

Le secteur forestier canadien a besoin d’information détaillée au sujet de la quantité et des caractéristiques des ressources forestières. Pour répondre à de tels besoins, des systèmes d’inventaire exacts, complets et opportuns qui quantifient spatialement le bois d’œuvre et les autres services écosystémiques liés aux forêts sont nécessaires. Le pr...

The Canadian forest sector requires detailed information regarding the amount and characteristics of the forest resource. To address these needs, inventory systems that spatially quantify timber and other forest related ecosystem services are required, that are accurate, comprehensive and timely. The Assessment of Wood properties using Remote Sensi...

Purpose of Review The increasing availability of three-dimensional point clouds, including both airborne laser scanning and digital aerial photogrammetry, allow for the derivation of forest inventory information with a high level of attribute accuracy and spatial detail. When available at two points in time, point cloud datasets offer a rich source...

A Publisher Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40725-021-00139-6

The uptake of technologies such as airborne laser scanning (ALS) and more recently digital aerial photogrammetry (DAP) enable the characterization of 3-dimensional (3D) forest structure. These forest structural attributes are widely applied in the development of modern enhanced forest inventories. As an alternative to extensive ALS or DAP based for...

Airborne laser scanning (ALS) is a remote sensing technology known for its applicability in natural resources management. By quantifying the three-dimensional structure of vegetation and underlying terrain using laser technology, ALS has been used extensively for enhancing geospatial knowledge in the fields of forestry and ecology. Structural descr...

Forest inventories in uncertain future economic and environmental conditions require the development of cost-effective measurement techniques to provide robust and accurate information on forests across regional and global scales. Digital terrestrial photogrammetry (DTP) can be used to detect and measure trees on sample plots. In this study, a meth...

Airborne laser scanning (ALS) systems tuned to the near-infrared (NIR; 1064 nm) wavelength have become the best available data source for characterizing vegetation structure. Proliferation of multi-spectral ALS (M-ALS) data with lasers tuned at two additional wavelengths (commonly 532 nm; green, and 1550 nm; short-wave infrared (SWIR)) has promoted...

The ability to expand the use of predictive Airborne Laser Scanning (ALS)-derived Forest Resource Inventory (FRI) models to broader regional scales is crucial for supporting large scale sustainable forest management. This research examined the transferability of ALS-based FRI attributes between two forest estates located in the eastern and western...

Key message High-density airborne laser scanning can be used to generate metrics that help characterize and differentiate the structure of Douglas-fir across three genetic levels at three different planting spacings. Abstract In British Columbia, Canada, Douglas-fir [Pseudotsuga menziesii (Mirb.) Franco] selective breeding is used to develop genet...

Analyses characterizing canopy gaps are required to improve our understanding of spatial and structural variations in forest canopies and provide insight into ecosystem-level successional processes. Gap size frequency distributions (GSFD) are indicative of ecological processes and disturbance patterns. To date, GSFD in boreal forest ecosystems have...

Knowledge on forest structure is vital for sustainable forest management decisions. Currently, Airborne Laser Scanning (ALS) has been well established as an effective tool to delineate and characterize the structure of canopies across a range of forested biomes. However, the use of ALS to provide information on sub-canopy structure is less well dev...

The value of combining Landsat time series and airborne laser scanning (ALS) data to produce regional maps of forest structure has been well documented. However, studies are often performed over single study areas or forest types, preventing a robust assessment of the approaches that produce the most accurate estimates. Here, we use Landsat time se...

Unmanned aerial systems digital aerial photogrammetry (UAS-DAP) is an emerging technology that has the capacity to generate dense three-dimensional point clouds similar to airborne laser scanning (ALS). Over forested areas, these point clouds can be used to model forest attributes using the area-based approach (ABA). However, with DAP point clouds,...

Digital aerial photogrammetry (DAP) has demonstrated utility across a range of forest environments as an alternative data source to airborne laser scanning (ALS) for estimating forest inventory attributes in an area-based approach. In this context, metrics are typically derived from the DAP point cloud in a manner analogous to that of ALS data. How...

The field of remote sensing is undergoing rapid changes through the utilization of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology. The rise of this new technology and the corresponding growth in the application of digital aerial photogrammetric point clouds (DAP) require renewed investigation into individual tree detection (ITD) routines; most of which h...

Forest roads allow access for silvicultural operations, harvesting, recreational activities, wildlife management, and fire suppression. In British Columbia, Canada, roads that are no longer required must be deactivated (temporarily, semipermanently, or permanently) in order to minimize the impact on the overall forested ecosystem. However, the remo...

Airborne laser scanning (ALS) and digital aerial photogrammetry (DAP) have both been demonstrated as reliable sources of information on forest stand inventory attributes. The increasing availability of both datasets provides a means for improving stand dynamics information over time; however, the cost of multi-temporal ALS can be prohibitive in som...

Knowledge of forest stand successional pathways, and responses to disturbances, is crucial for improved sustainable management of the resource. Forest structure, one attribute of which is the size and height distribution of trees in a stand (known as the stem size distribution; SSD), is highly sensitive to changes in stand dynamics. However, monito...

Key Message This study showed that digital terrestrial photogrammetry is able to produce accurate estimates of stem volume and diameter across a range of species and tree sizes that showed strong correspondence when compared with traditional inventory techniques. This paper demonstrates the utility of the technology for characterizing trees in comp...

This photogrammetric point cloud was constructed using a set of 12 spherical images taken at different heights at two locations around the tree. The tree is a black spruce (Picea mariana), with a diameter at breast height of 20.7 cm. The tree is located within Forest Management Unit S20 near the towns of Slave Lake and Swan Hills in Alberta, Cana...

Airborne laser scanning (ALS) is a reliable source of accurate information for forest stand inventory attributes including height, cover, basal area, and volume. The commonly applied area-based approach (ABA) allows the derivation of wall-to-wall geospatial coverages representing each of the modeled attributes at a grid-cell level, with spatial res...

The use of laser scanning acquired from the air, or ground, holds great potential for the assessment of forest structural attributes, beyond conventional forest inventory. The use of full-waveform airborne laser scanning (ALS FW) data allows for the extraction of detailed information in different vertical strata compared to discrete ALS (ALS D). Te...

Attributes that describe forest structure, such as height, canopy cover, volume, and biomass, are required to inform forest inventories and monitoring programs. Light Detection and Ranging (lidar) has been successfully demonstrated as a means to derive a suite of forest structure attributes at the plot level; however, these acquisitions are often c...

Digital aerial photogrammetry (DAP) and unmanned aerial systems (UAS) have emerged as synergistic technologies capable of enhancing forest inventory information. A known limitation of DAP technology is its ability to derive terrain surfaces in areas with moderate to high vegetation coverage. In this study, we sought to investigate the influence of...

Spruce budworm (Choristoneura fumiferana [Clem.], Lepidoptera: Tortricidae) is a native defoliating insect with an important disturbance role in the eastern boreal forests of North America. With an extensive history of outbreaks and associated impacts on forest structural changes and timber supply, the mapping of spruce budworm defoliation has been...

Forest canopy gaps play an important role in forest dynamics. Airborne laser scanning (ALS) data provide demonstrated capacity to systematically and accurately detect and map canopy gaps over large forest areas. Digital aerial photogrammetry (DAP) is emerging as an alternative, lower-cost source of three-dimensional information for characterizing f...

The increasing availability of highly detailed three-dimensional remotely-sensed data depicting forests, including airborne laser scanning (ALS) and digital aerial photogrammetric (DAP) approaches, provides a means for improving stand dynamics information. The availability of data from ALS and DAP has stimulated attempts to link these datasets with...

Stem size distribution (SSD), which describes tree frequencies in diameter classes within an area, has a variety of direct and indirect applications that are critical for forest management. In this study, we evaluated which structural characteristics derived from Airborne Laser Scanning (ALS) data were best able to differentiate between unimodal an...

Timely and cost-effective monitoring of biodiversity across large areas is a major challenge, yet an important component of monitoring programs that inform policy and conservation strategies. Recent advances in Airborne Laser Scanning (ALS) provide new opportunities to simultaneously measure vegetation structure and terrain morphology at fine spati...

Airborne Laser Scanning data—also known as Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR)—enables the accurate three-dimensional characterization of vertical forest structure. Airborne Laser Scanning data have proven to be an information-rich asset for forest managers, enabling the generation of highly detailed digital elevation models and the estimation of a...

En 2013, le Service canadien des forêts de Ressources naturelles Canada a publié un guide des pratiques exemplaires pour la production d’un inventaire forestier à partir de données obtenues par balayage laser aéroporté1. Ce guide a été créé pour rassembler des approches, des méthodes et des outils de pointe dans le but d’informer les lecteurs, de l...

Recent research has shown that image-derived point clouds (IPCs) are a highly competitive alternative to airborne laser scanning (ALS) data in the context of selected forest inventory activities. However, there is still a need for investigating different kinds of aerial images used for point cloud generation. This study compares the effectiveness o...

Accurate, reliable, and cost-effective methods of evaluating forest regeneration success are needed to improve forest inventories and silvicultural operations. While traditional surveys are relatively inexpensive and meet current data requirements, their annual coverage of over 1 million hectares in British Columbia alone are operationally and logi...

Visibility estimation is one of the most fundamental spatial analyses, usually conducted with the use of 2D and 3D GIS tools. The 3D approach requires 3D features that represent the complex character of visibility obstacles. While a bare ground surface can be precisely represented with raster data, and building footprints can be extruded into 3D ob...

Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) are capable of improving the efficiency of acquisition and providing fine spatial scale data for sustainable resource management. In this paper we begin by describing differences between UAS airframes, their successes and limitations, and list contemporary research applications. UAS compatible sensor technologies are d...

The established position and increasing availability of Airborne Laser Scanning (ALS) as an important source of information including forest inventory, allows additional applications to be developed when such data are already available. One key focus area for the application of ALS data is the assessment of riparian ecosystems, due to their critica...

Vegetation structure is identified as an important biodiversity indicator providing the physical environment that generates, supports, and maintains forest biodiversity. Airborne lidar systems (light detection and ranging) have the capacity to accurately measure three-dimensional vegetation structure, and have been widely used in wildlife habitat m...

Remote sensing has been increasingly used to assist forest inventory. Airborne Laser Scanning (ALS) systems can accurately estimate tree height in forests, and are being combined with more traditional optical images that provide further details about the horizontal structure of forests. To predict forest attributes two main techniques are applied t...

Accurate information on both the current stock and future growth and yield of forest resources is critical for sustainable forest management. We demonstrate a novel approach to utilizing airborne laser scanning (ALS)-derived forest stand attributes to determine future growth and yield of six attributes at a sub-stand (25 m grid cell) level of detai...

To improve precision management and the cost effectiveness of forest practices, we investigate a pre-harvest airborne laser scanning (ALS) forest inventory with an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) acquired post-harvest digital aerial photogrammetry (DAP) inventory to identify the location and residual volume of stands following selection harvesting. A...

Most efforts to link remote sensing to species distributions and movement have focused on indirect estimates of traits based on components of physiological and functional biodiversity. Such a view reflects one perspective on the general needs (habitat) of species. However, information on the vertical and horizontal structure of habitat may play a c...

Forest inventory and management requirements are changing rapidly in the context of an increasingly complex set of economic, environmental, and social policy objectives. Advanced remote sensing technologies provide data to assist in addressing these escalating information needs and to support the subsequent development and parameterization of model...

Debates on the encroaching commercialization of public space by outdoor advertising highlight its possible negative impact on local quality of life and enjoyment of public spaces. These overstimulating outdoor advertisements are often considered a source of visual pollution, but cities have no standard way of measuring where it exists and its local...

Site index (SI), defined as stand dominant height at a given reference age, is a commonly used measure of forest productivity. SI is typically estimated by applying species-specific models to a sample of dominant trees in the stand (age-height curves). Once assessed, SI allows managers to project stand height at given age. Airborne Laser Scanning (...

Digital aerial photogrammetry (DAP) is emerging as an alternate data source to airborne laser scanning (ALS) data for three-dimensional characterization of forest structure. In this study we compare point cloud metrics and plot-level model estimates derived from ALS data and an image-based point cloud generated using semi-global matching (SGM) for...

Site productivity, an important measure of the capacity of land to produce wood biomass, is traditionally estimated by applying species-specific, locally designed models that describe the relation between stand age and dominant height. In this article, we present an approach to derive chronosequences of stand age and height estimates from remotely...

Information on individual tree attributes is important for sustainable management of forest stands. Airborne Laser Scanning (ALS) point clouds are an excellent source of information for predicting a range of forest stand attributes, with plot and single tree volume being among the most important. Two approaches exist for estimating volume: area-bas...

In this study, we explored the consequences of using leaf-on and leaf-off airborne laser scanning (ALS) data on area-based model outcomes in a lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta var. latifolia Engelm.) dominated forest in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in Alberta, Canada. We considered eight forest attributes: top height, mean height, Lorey’s mea...

A key requirement of sustainable forest management is accurate, timely, and comprehensive information on forest resources, which is provided through forest inventories. In Canada, forest inventories are conventionally undertaken through the delineation and interpretation of forest stands using aerial photography, supported by data from permanent an...

The aim of this research was to present the land cover structure and landscape diversity in the West Polesie Biosphere Reserve. The land cover classification was performed using Object Based Image Analysis in Trimble eCognition Developer 8 software. The retrospective land cover changes analysis in 3 lake catchments (Kleszczów, Moszne, Białe Włodaws...

The aim of this study was to elaborate the semiautomatic method of airborne laser scanning (ALS) point-cloud data processing for revising a digital forest map in the Tatra National Park, Poland, and updating attributes stored in its descriptive forest database. We proved that elements such as gaps, clearings, biogroups, dead trees, wind-damaged tre...

The paper presents the results from the study concerning the application of airborne laser scanning (ALS) data and derived raster products like the digital surface model (DSM) and the digital terrain model (DTM) for the assessment of the degree of change of the land use based on the forest succession example. Simultaneously, an automated method of...

Erfassung von Einzelbaumparametern mit Airborne-Laser-Scanning-Daten

Modern spatial data acquisition technologies like airborne laser scanning and satellite images can be used to automatically m ap land cover classes. The layers representing spatial extent of various terrain objects are very valuable, especially when the 3D geometrical information stored in the ALS point clouds is taken into consideration. The paper...