Case Study - Handheld Scanning for Forests

At Grantham Coates Surveys we carry out topographic surveys in all manner of environments and were recently commissioned to carry out surveys on numerous hectares of forest. The deliverables here were standard topographic 3D surveys showing all trees over 300mm, but knowing from experience that these types of surveys can often be extremely time-consuming, we decided we needed to find a way of speeding up the process in order to avoid extended project timescales and thus higher fees.

Proudly we regularly evaluate our workflows, equipment and technology to continually improve our working practices, and decided to run an experiment to see how we could speed up a forest scan without compromising on the quality of the data. We therefore compared standard terrestrial laser scan data from a previous 30 hectare forest survey in 2018, with a sample collected in our local forest with the new GeoSlam Horizon handheld scanner.

Not only did the GeoSlam Horizon have a greater range, but with the assistance of James Philips from Korec we discovered that the data collected also had reduced errors across the area being of the order +-20mm. The result of this meant that using the GeoSlam Horizon and a combination of GeoHub, Cyclone and LSS Point Cloud to process the data into a full 3D topographic survey, would take less time and therefore at a lower cost to our client.

Using the GeoSlam Horizon enabled us to provide a forest survey that contained more information than could be captured using more traditional methods.

We achieved:

• Less time on site and reduced health and safety issues
• Richer, more complete data
• The ability to include trees down to 100mm bole, not just 300mm or above
• An overall reduced cost to our client

GeoSlam Horizon in action!

One Zeb Horizon data set. All captured from hand held ground level scanner.

Our location in the forest during the scanning process.