Estimating the Leaf Area of Urban Individual Trees from Single-Scan Terrestrial Laser Scanner Based on Slant Leaf Area Index

In this paper, we develop the Slant Leaf Area Index based Method (SLAIM) to estimate the leaf area of individual trees from single-scan Terrestrial Laser Scanner (TLS) data by introducing the concept of Slant Leaf Area Index (SLAI). SLAI quantifies the amount of leaves along the view direction and can be retrieved at given view zeniths using gap probability. Subsequently, leaf area can be accumulated by SLAI across the whole crown. The innovative SLAIM offers several advantages. Firstly, it operates with single-scan point clouds, which are more accessible than multiple-scan data. Secondly, it effectively corrects the clumping effect resulting from non-uniform leaf distribution. Both simulated and field-measured TLS point clouds of trees are used to test the method. The results show that the error of SLAIM is less than 10% in most cases.