Deriving Floodplain Topography and Vegetation Characteristics for Hydraulic Engineering Applications by Means of Terrestrial Laser Scanning
Publication: Journal of Hydraulic Engineering
Volume 140, Issue 11
Abstract
The purpose of this study was to explore the applicability of terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) in determining floodplain ground level and vegetation properties for hydraulic analyses. The field investigations were conducted in a two-stage channel containing five differently vegetated test reaches established to represent conditions from bare soil to grasses and tall willows. Comparing TLS to manual cross-sectional and vegetation surveys brought new insight into the reliability of TLS as a method to determine the vegetation characteristics and floodplain ground level for different seasons and variable vegetation cover. The detected ground level had a mean absolute error (MAE) of 2–14 cm in the grassy test reaches with 50 cm window size. In spring the reach-averaged MAE was 4 cm and increased to 8 cm for the late growing season. For the densely vegetated test reaches, increasing the point cloud density from did not considerably improve the ground-level estimate. For deriving spatial information about physically based vegetation characteristics such as the height distribution and the volumetric blockage factor, a digital surface model of 1 cm in resolution appeared suitable.
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Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank Kaisa Västilä for the manually surveyed cross sections and September vegetation samples, Jari Hotinen for the total station and TLS measurement, Vahur Joala for providing information about the Leica Cyclone software and Matti Vaaja for the comparison to the iterative point cloud classification. Two anonymous reviewers are acknowledged for helpful comments to improve the manuscript. This work was supported by the Academy of Finland and Maa- ja vesitekniikan tuki ry.
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Journal of Hydraulic Engineering
Volume 140 • Issue 11 • November 2014
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© 2014 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Jul 2, 2013
Accepted: Jun 9, 2014
Published online: Jul 21, 2014
Published in print: Nov 1, 2014
Discussion open until: Dec 21, 2014
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