The 3D reconstruction of wood and leaves from terrestrial laser scanning – a case study on PAR measurements below a solitary Malus domestica tree

Abstract

In this paper, we present a new methodology that directly extracts the geometry of woody features (wood and bark) and foliage from 3D data originating from terrestrial laser scans. Our goal was to enhance the precision of radiative transfer models for modelling tree shading by using highly resolved 3D tree models. The approach was tested on a single apple tree (Malus domestica (Suckow) Borkh.) in a peri-urban setting and was validated by utilising an open-source radiative transfer model and comparing the simulation output with in-situ measurements of photosynthetically active radiation (PAR) as well as simulations utilizing turbid voxels of 0.2 m and 1 m edge length. The in-situ measurements of 60 PAR sensors showed a correlation coefficient (r) of 0.92 with the simulated light intensities for the reconstructed polygons which was higher than for the voxel-based approaches (0.2 m: r = 0.85, 1 m: r = 0.73). We were able to demonstrate that our approach effectively simulates light extinction through the canopy. This innovative method has the potential to easily provide detailed insights into high resolution radiation patterns within forests, which are connected to multiple ecosystem functions like species and habitat diversity.

Code and data availability

The authors state that all study data (TLS-derived point clouds, PAR measurements) and the full R code for the leaf/wood polygon reconstruction are openly available in their GitHub repository, archived as Frey & Kröner 2024 (JulFrey/dotshadow, Zenodo DOI 10.5281/zenodo.14204435, cited in the references). The Zenodo URL