Modelling the standing timber volume of Baden-Württemberg—A large-scale approach using a fusion of Landsat, airborne LiDAR and National Forest Inventory data

•The paper shows the potential of airborne LiDAR in combination with Landsat for estimating timber volume on a large scale.•We analyze the potential of the German National Forest Inventory data for usage as terrestrial reference for interpolating timber volume.•We show the excellent functioning of generalized additive models (GAM) for large scale timber volume estimations.•The study reveals that human impact on forest strongly influence timber volume estimations.

Remote sensing-based timber volume estimation is key for modelling the regional potential, accessibility and price of lignocellulosic raw material for an emerging bioeconomy. We used a unique wall-to-wall airborne LiDAR dataset and Landsat 7 satellite images in combination with terrestrial inventory data derived from the National Forest Inventory (NFI), and applied generalized additive models (GAM) to estimate spatially explicit timber distribution and volume in forested areas. Since the NFI data showed an underlying structure regarding size and ownership, we additionally constructed a socio-economic predictor to enhance the accuracy of the analysis. Furthermore, we balanced the training dataset with a bootstrap method to achieve unbiased regression weights for interpolating timber volume. Finally, we compared and discussed the model performance of the original approach (r2 = 0.56, NRMSE = 9.65%), the approach with balanced training data (r2 = 0.69, NRMSE = 12.43%) and the final approach with balanced training data and the additional socio-economic predictor (r2 = 0.72, NRMSE = 12.17%). The results demonstrate the usefulness of remote sensing techniques for mapping timber volume for a future lignocellulose-based bioeconomy.