Forest inventory with sparse resolution Airborne Laser Scanning data a literature review

The article reviews 34 recent Nordic studies on the use of sparse resolution ALS data for forest inventory. Key parameters of the applied ALS data - study area, ground truth data, applied methods, resulting regression models and reliability of the models - are summarised for each study. The reviewed articles show that ALS techniques can be used for estimating forest resources at stand level and the accuracy is in most cases better than the accuracy of ocular field estimations. The review will be useful in selecting modeling approaches in further studies. The published models might be used also as a priori information when estimating new models, especially with sparse ground truth data or even without new data.