Thanks a lot Mike!

Overall, handheld MLS showed great potential to support the Swiss NFI in the near future, giving us ways to analyse the diversity and dynamics of forests in new ways that are currently not possible with conventional methods.

Tree detection rate of NFI measured trees was at 82.6% on average with an RMSE of 2.8 cm for the DBH estimation. Especially steeper terrain challenged accurate DBH estimation and should be investigated more.

Occlusion over all evaluated plots was minimal with 9% of the entire canopy volume in average. This ensures that handheld MLS with employed measurement strategy delivers a high coverage of the entire 3D canopy.

MLS showed high reliability to produce analysis ready point clouds for forest structural assessment also under challenging conditions with very dense understorey vegetation or very steep terrain gradients