The overall results in the paper “Assessing the potential of mobile laser scanning for stand-level forest inventories in near-natural forests” suggest that many quantitative forest attributes (mean DBH, basal area, growing stock, dominant height, understory cover, and the number of trees) can be successfully estimated using a handheld mobile laser scanner even in structurally complex forest plots. Diameter distribution of stands and tree maps can also be extracted from point cloud data. Estimation accuracies generally increase with stand maturation, but there is still a need for traditional field surveys to capture qualitative attributes, such as species mixture and timber quality.
