• Hoover, Coeli
  USDA Forest Service
  
• Ducey, Mark
  University of New Hampshire
  
• Colter, Andy
  USDA Forest Service
  
• Yamasaki, Mariko
  USDA Forest Service
  

LiDAR-based methods are becoming increasingly common in forest inventory and have been used successfully to estimate forest biomass in multiple forest types. We tested a "universal" LiDAR approach developed by Asner et al. (2011) for use in tropical forests. The advantage to this method is that it reduces the amount of inventory data that must be collected in the field, which removes a barrier to using LiDAR for inventory at larger spatial extents. We tested this method in a small mixed-species watershed on the White Mountains National Forest; while the universal model performed well when used with field-collected data, it failed to predict biomass accurately when used exclusively with LiDAR-derived variables. This is due to the lack of a meaningful relationship between LiDAR canopy height and plot-level basal area in this forest type. However, the LiDAR-based canopy height and density metrics are still useful for forest characterization and planning purposes.