3. Canopy Lidar

3.1 Targets

Vegetation and canopy are more or less dense environments of leaves, branches and trunks. They are made up of a multitude of hard targets that reflect and absorb incident laser light. The power reflected, transmitted and absorbed varies according to the nature, shape, orientation, spatial distribution and density of the plant elements.

12 shows examples of leaf targets made up of a set of leaves of random spatial distribution and orientation. Only the leaves are shown. Leaf targets are materialized by the interaction volume delimited by the laser beam footprint and the length $c{t}_{}$