Uncertainty Quantification in ALS-Based Species-Specific Growing Stock Volume Estimation

In this paper, we propose an approach to quantify the plot-level uncertainty in species-specific growing stock volume estimated from airborne laser scanning data and aerial imagery. This is accomplished by adopting the framework of Bayesian inference in the area-based estimation of stock volume. The results show that the proposed approach performs well in quantifying the estimate uncertainty and produces optimal interval estimates for species-specific volumes when sufficient training data are available. Also the point estimate accuracy is competitive with current state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, we demonstrate how the quantified uncertainties of the stand attributes can be utilized to determine the uncertainty in classification done using the estimated stand attributes.