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Related: Just the other day I used USGS 3DEP LiDAR data + Claude Code to get a sense for the number of trees on my property. Diffing terrain map and canopy map
by whalesalad 7mo ago
Related: Just the other day I used USGS 3DEP LiDAR data + Claude Code to get a sense for the number of trees on my property. Diffing terrain map and canopy map gives tree elevation. It was a fun project to explore, primarily because I set CC loose and said "here is the bounding box of my property, pad it by 50 feet and then go absolutely nuts against government datasets gathering as much open data as you can" - it figured out the rest. Dug into soil maps, historical satellite imagery, and lidar data.
Here are the visuals re: trees - https://i.imgur.com/R0W4q4O.png https://i.imgur.com/R0W4q4O.png
- fnands 7mo agoThe USGS Lidar data is a treasure trove, I use it a lot at work. What did you do to actually count trees? Even from aerial Lidar it can be a bit finicky for closed canopies.
- whalesalad 7mo agoIt's very rudimentary: smooth the canopy and find the local maxima above a base height. It's really just identifying the tallest points. Here is the first pass, https://i.imgur.com/f7Gpxmm.png https://i.imgur.com/f7Gpxmm.png, it under counted and also even counted my house as a tree, lol.
- fnands 7mo ago> counted my house as a tree Even the more sophisticated algorithms pretty much always do this ;-) You are probably not interested in taking this further, but you could give the Li tree filter a try: https://pdal.org/en/stable/stages/filters.litree.html https://pdal.org/en/stable/stages/filters.litree.html But getting perfect segmentation is basically impossible.