Volume tables and terrestrial laser scanning: a technology innovation supporting forest mensuration

Ecologically and economically sustainable planning of forest resources requires tools capable of providing estimates with adequate accuracy on volume, biomass and woody increments. Interest in these attributes has increased since the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change has been given a further boost by the birth of the carbon credit market in the early 2000s. However, the data collection necessary to formulate allometric models for estimating wood volume is challenging, both due to the considerable amount of data required and because the necessary destructive measurements are very laborious. Furthermore, given the great structural, managerial and environmental diversity that characterizes the Italian forests, the sample size for the development of allometric models must necessarily be large. Over the years, all these aspects have led to a progressive abandonment of measurements in the forests for the production of volume tables. Recent applications of the terrestrial laser scanner (TLS) for collecting dimensional information on trees have demonstrated their effectiveness. In this study we present the work carried out in the autumn/winter 2022-2023 for the creation of new volume tables for the black pine forests in Vallombrosa (FI - Central Italy), based on data collected with a TLS. The study involved the same pine forests studied in 1969 for the production of volume tables in Vallombrosa. After showing the methods and analysis needed to obtain the volume tables, the paper discusses the results in comparison with those produced in 1969.