sol-LAUT – Point clouds and hemispherical photographs for solar radiation modeling from Austrian forest inventory plots

The amount of solar radiation reaching the forest floor is a crucial parameter for the abundance and vitality of regenerating trees. Therefore, its quantification and characterization are of particular importance for forest management. The calculation of below-canopy light regime from forest point clouds collected with personal laser scanners offers an opportunity to assess the necessary metrics without the requirement of any additional data collection.

This dataset contains 3D point cloud data collected on 40 forest inventory plots in Austria, which can be found in the folder ‘PointClouds’. The scanner used for data acquisition was a mobile personal laser scanner (PLS) (ZEB Horizon, GeoSLAM Ltd., Nottingham, UK). Furthermore, hemispherical photographs were taken at the same forest plots using the Solariscope SOL 300 (Behlin, Wedemark, Germany) as well as a Canon EOS 5D camera (Canon Inc., Ōta, Tokyo, Japan) mounted on a SLM9 self-levelling mount (Delta-T Devices Ltd., Burwell, Cambridge, UK) together with HemiView software (Delta-T Devices Ltd., 2016). The raw and classified images can be found in the corresponding subfolders (‘HemiView’ or ‘Solariscope’) in the folder ‘HemisphericalPhotography’. Additionally, the results obtained with the classified images of Solariscope and HemiView are included in the output files. Note that the results from the Solariscope survey represent average values over a predefined time span, in this case from April 1 to September 30, 2022. Also, the range of solar zenith angles considered for the analyses was set from 0 to 50° in the device settings, meaning that radiation values originating from moments with a solar elevation angle below 40° were not included into the calculations. The file 'Plots.csv' contains the geographical coordinates of the inventory plots (columns 'X' and 'Y', EPSG:31286). The file 'treespecies.csv' gives information on the percentage of tree species at each plot, which is necessary for the calculation of a plot-wise canopy extinction coefficient.