Low-Cost Non-Contact Forest Inventory: A Case Study of Kieni Forest in Kenya

Abstract

Forests are a vital source of food, fuel, and medicine and play a crucial role in climate change mitigation. Strategic and policy decisions on forest management and conservation require accurate and up-to-date information on available forest resources. Forest inventory data such as tree parameters, heights, and crown diameters must be collected and analysed to monitor forests effectively. Traditional manual techniques are slow and labour-intensive, requiring additional personnel, while existing non-contact methods are costly, computationally intensive, or less accurate. Kenya plans to increase its forest cover to 30% by 2032 and establish a national forest monitoring system. Building capacity in forest monitoring through innovative field data collection technologies is encouraged to match the pace of increase in forest cover. This study explored the applicability of low-cost, non-contact tree inventory based on stereoscopic photogrammetry in a recently reforested stand in Kieni Forest, Kenya. A custom-built stereo camera was used to capture images of 251 trees in the study area from which the tree heights and crown diameters were successfully extracted quickly and with high accuracy. The results imply that stereoscopic photogrammetry is an accurate and reliable method that can support the national forest monitoring system and REDD+ implementation.

Plant phenotyping relevance

ステレオ写真測量を用いて樹高と樹冠径を非接触で抽出し、精度と信頼性を評価しているため、植物形質取得手法が研究の中心です。

Code and data availability

The paper's Data Availability Statement explicitly states that the supporting data and software code for the stereoscopic photogrammetry tree inventory (tree height, crown diameter, DBH extraction from stereo images of 251 trees in Kieni Forest) are publicly available on the authors' GitHub repository DeKUT-DSAIL/TreeV