Evaluating the Use of Lidar to Discern Snag Characteristics Important for Wildlife

Standing dead trees (known as snags) are historically difficult to map and model using airborne laser scanning (ALS), or lidar. Specific snag characteristics are important for wildlife; for instance, a larger snag with a broken top can serve as a nesting platform for raptors. The objective of this study was to evaluate whether characteristics such as top intactness could be inferred from discrete-return ALS data. We collected structural information for 198 snags in closed-canopy conifer forest plots in Idaho. We selected 13 lidar metrics within 5 m diameter point clouds to serve as predictor variables in random forest (RF) models to classify snags into four groups by size (small (<40 cm diameter) or large (>= 40 cm diameter)) and intactness (intact or broken top) across multiple iterations. We conducted these models first with all snags combined, and then ran the same models with only small or large snags. Overall accuracies were highest in RF models with large snags only (77%), but kappa statistics for all models were low (0.29-0.49). ALS data alone were not sufficient to identify top intactness for large snags; future studies combining ALS data with other remotely sensed data to improve classification of snag characteristics important for wildlife is encouraged.