Development and Experiment of an Electronic Forest Compass Instrument
Tree height and tree position are important indicators in empirical forest decision-making and are commonly used to estimate standing parameters such as forest growth,tree age,wood volume,biomass and carbon stock,and the accuracy in the measurement has a significant impact on the evaluation of standing wood quality and estimation of forest growth.This study addressed some of the drawbacks within the present forest survey,such as high device price,not easily moved,long duration of one measuring procedure,and labor-intensive.Aming at those drawbacks,a novel electronic compass device was developed for forest survey based on three-dimensional electronic compass and laser ranging radar.The device consisted of embedded hardware and software and an Android application was developed to support user to operate this device.Overall,it realized the electronic and digital measurement of tree height and tree position by one device.After then,59 standing trees were employed to verify the accuracy and efficiency of the device.The results showed that:in terms of accuracy,the mean absolute error of azimuth was 4.5° and the accuracy of tree height was 96.95%;in terms of operational efficiency,this device was about twice as efficient as the total station.In conclusion,the developed device in this study had the features including portable,low manufacturing cost,and internal and external operations integration.Only in this way,it could accord with various technical provisions such as accuracy in the continuous forest inventory(CFI)in China,which would have broad application prospects in forestry resource inventory.
compasstree heightazimuthintegration of indoor and outdoor work
万方数据
维普
