Large-area virtual forests from terrestrial laser scanning data

Combining virtual forests with radiative transfer is a powerful tool to calibrate and validate ground-based, airborne and spaceborne sensors. In this set-up, we can control and calculate all aspects of the forest structure and the simulated signal, which would not be possible using measured data only. Terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) enables us to measure forest structure directly with high detail. We present a processing chain that uses TLS data as input data to assess the end-to-end traceability of various in situ LAI and fAPAR products via radiative transfer modelling. Tree reconstruction from TLS data is used to represent the explicit 3D forest structure in radiative transfer models.