Estimation of wetland vegetation height and leaf area index using airborne laser scanning data

Wetland vegetation LAI was estimated using laser penetration index (LPI) and LiDAR-predicted vegetation height. The results showed that the vegetation height-based predictive model (R2 = 0.79) was more accurate than the LPI-based model (the highest R2 was 0.70). Moreover, the LAI predictive model based on vegetation height was validated using the leave-one-out cross-validation method and the results showed that the LAI predictive model had a good generalization capability. Overall, the results from this study indicate that LiDAR has a great potential to estimate plant height and LAI for short wetland vegetation.