Ground Truth Vegetation Characteristics For CZO LiDAR Study

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Intellectual merit:This proposal contributes to a national effort to develop and calibrate methods for quantifying vegetation characteristics and snow cover from aerial LiDAR data. The study will involve all the Critical Zone Observatories and will therefore encompass diverse physiographic, climatic, and geologic settings from California to Delaware to Puerto Rico. The new methods will allow accurate, spatially explicit estimates to be obtained; current approaches are either too labor-intensive or lack precision when applied to large areas.Broader ImpactsThe methods developed during this study will provide useful data for a wide variety of applications, including watershed scale hydrological modeling, natural resource assessments, mesoscale climate models, and other studies that require accurate, spatially explicit assessment of vegetation and snow cover.