Analysis of Output - MeganKress/LiVoxGen GitHub Wiki

The information from the output files from LiVoxGen may be used in different ways. First, the histogram flat files can be imported into a statistical programming language and analyzed. As an example, a heat map showing forest densities (based on voxels point counts) can be generated by the R package VoxGenR (included in the GitHub repository for LiVoxGen).

In addition to analyzing forest composition with voxels, a user can gain further insights into fire data with the LiDAR metric flat files. If the user has raster data from a fire in the form of a shapefile or vector file, he or she can create a simple R script that extracts the data from the raster for each voxel column centroid. The extracted data can then be compared to the lidar metrics for each centroid, and patterns in data may emerge as we observed in comparing the years since a centroid burned with the centroid’s fraction of first returns intercepted by a tree (“tree_fcover”).

The output files of LiVoxGen (histogram flat files and lidar metric files) provide the user with the flexibility needed to explore LiDAR data in a new form. By allowing users to quickly estimate forest densities, voxels provide a new avenue into examining LAS files. My goals for LiVoxGen include improving its efficiency and discovering further applications for its histogram flat files.