Thomas Rasquinet joined the DFL as a PhD student. Thomas will be working on the use of lidar to characterize wood quality.
News
Arrivals, defenses, field campaigns, talks and new papers from the lab.
2026
Marie-Luce Presson joined the DFL as a PhD student. Marie-Luce will be working on the role of trees in urban microclimate.
Martin presented “Estimating leaf damage from hot drought events and predicting the effects on forest productivity from multilayer canopy models” remotely at the EGU General Assembly 2026 in Vienna, Austria.
2025
Omid Reisi Gahrouei graduated with his PhD. Congratulations Omid!
Pauline successfully defended her thesis with lots of praise from the jury. Congratulations Pauline!
Pauline, Omid and Ny presented at the Congrès de l’Association québécoise de télédétection 2025 in Quebec City.
Chris Scarpone joined the DFL as a postdoc to follow up on work by Karl, who returned to his girlfriend in France.
Ny and Omid presented at SilviLaser 2025 in Quebec City.
Martin presented at the AGU Chapman conference in Boulder, CO.
Martin presented at the AMS Denver summit.
Martin presented the virtual reality project at the ACFAS in Montreal.
Martin presented at the 2025 Land Model and Biogeochemistry Working Groups Meeting, remotely.
Several papers published and accepted in 2025:
- Gahrouei OR (PhD student), Côté J-F, Giguère P, Guindon L, Bournival P, Béland M. (In review). Tree species classification in Canadian boreal forest using PRISMA hyperspectral and LiDAR data. Forestry.
- Gahrouei OR (PhD student), Côté J-F, Giguère P, Guindon L, Bournival P, Béland M. (Accepted). Windthrow mapping in boreal forests using a spatio-temporal deep learning approach and Sentinel-2 imagery. Remote Sensing of Environment.
- Montalban K (postdoc), Moszkowicz T, St-Denis A, Messier C, Béland M. (Accepted). Exploring the impact of ice storm on urban forestry and branch fall using mobile LiDAR. Urban Forestry & Urban Greening.
- Perbet P (PhD student), Guindon L, Côté J-F, Béland M. (In press). Evaluating Landsat time series of above-ground biomass to monitor boreal forest recovery following different disturbance types. Canadian Journal of Remote Sensing.
- Perbet P (PhD student), Guindon L, Correia DLP, Gahrouei OR, Côté J-F, Béland M. 2025. Historical insect disturbance maps from 1985 onwards for Canadian forests derived using earth observation data. Scientific Data.
- Béland M. 2025. Mapping wood area in forests from ground lidar and estimating their light interception using radiative transfer modeling. Agricultural and Forest Meteorology 375: 110883.
2024
Martin presented at the AGU Fall Meeting in Washington, DC.
Karl Montalban joined the DFL as a postdoc to work on mapping tree branch damage following an ice storm in Montreal, in collaboration with Christian Messier’s chair and Hydro-Québec.
Charlie Teurnier joined the DFL as a PhD student to work on foliage clumping and LAI in conifer trees.
Martin is visiting UC Berkeley and NCAR (Boulder, CO) again this year as part of a second six-month sabbatical.
Several papers published in 2024:
- Perbet P (PhD student), Guindon L, Côté J-F, Béland M. 2024. Evaluating deep learning methods applied to Landsat time series subsequences to detect and classify boreal forest disturbances events: The challenge of partial and progressive disturbances. Remote Sensing of Environment 306: 114107.
- Reisi Gahrouei O (PhD student), Côté J-F, Bournival P, Giguère P, Béland M. 2024. Comparison of deep and machine learning approaches for Quebec tree species classification using a combination of multispectral and LiDAR data. Canadian Journal of Remote Sensing 50(1): 2359433.
- Reyes-Consuelo MA (PhD student), Kiss J, Edwards G, Béland M. 2024. EEG-based affective responses to immersion in a virtual forest. The International Journal of Health, Wellness, and Society 14(4): 21–50.
- Yi K, Novick KA, Zhang Q, Wang L, Hwang T, Yang X, Mallick K, Béland M, Senay GB, Baldocchi DD. 2024. Responses of marginal and intrinsic water-use efficiency to changing aridity using FLUXNET observations. Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences 129(6).
- Béland M, Kobayashi H. 2024. Drivers of deciduous forest near-infrared reflectance: A 3D radiative transfer modeling exercise based on ground lidar. Remote Sensing of Environment 302: 113951.
2023
Martin presented at the AGU Fall Meeting in San Francisco.
Martin participated in the RAMI workshop in Varese, Italy.
The Digital Forest Lab was awarded the Nature x Carbon Tech Challenge prize.
Martin participated in the 1st StrucNet workshop in Potsdam, Germany.
Martin is visiting UC Berkeley and NCAR (Boulder, CO) as part of a six-month sabbatical.
2022
Julie Vigouroux has joined the DFL as a PhD student. Julie will work on characterizing tree degradation from insect infestation in northern Quebec using remote sensing.
2021
Xichun Zhou and Ny Tolotra have joined the DFL as PhD students. Xichun will work on the success and impact of reforestation efforts in Canada, and Ny will work on the use of lidar and hyperspectral data to characterize biodiversity in Canadian forests.
Van Tho Nguyen joined the DFL as a postdoc. Van Tho will be involved in the retrieval of LAI from terrestrial lidar scans in conifer forests, in algorithm development for estimating forest biomass from terrestrial lidar, and in the development of virtual forest environments derived from lidar.
Uziel Hernandez joined the lab as an MSc student in the Faculty of Medicine. Uziel is working on assessing the effect of our virtual forest on people with Alzheimer’s disease, together with Cyril Schneider from the rehabilitation department.
New publication: Béland, M. & Baldocchi, D. (2021). Vertical structure heterogeneity in broadleaf forests: Effects on light interception and canopy photosynthesis. Agricultural and Forest Meteorology, 307, 108525.
New publication on mapping leaf area in dense broadleaf forests: Béland, M. & Kobayashi, H. (2021). Mapping forest leaf area density from multiview terrestrial lidar. Methods in Ecology and Evolution.
2020
Omid Reisi Gahrouei has joined the lab as a PhD student and will study the combined use of airborne lidar and hyperspectral imagery to map tree species in forests.
Olivier Matte has obtained his MSc diploma. Congratulations Olivier!
New publication on branch-level clumping: Béland, M. & Baldocchi, D. (2020). Is foliage clumping an outcome of resource limitations within forests? Agricultural and Forest Meteorology, 295, 108185.
Miguel Alejandro Reyes Consuelo and Amin Shaker have started their master’s program with the lab and will work on our project to create a virtual forest to reduce anxiety in patients with Alzheimer’s disease.
2019
Martin presented “Is foliage clumping an outcome of resource limitations within forests?” at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting in San Francisco, and visited Dennis Baldocchi at UC Berkeley’s Biomet lab.
Martin presented “Reproduire le monde réel en réalité virtuelle : le rôle du lidar” on the potential for terrestrial lidar to generate complex virtual reality environments at the Centre interdisciplinaire de recherche en réadaptation et intégration sociale (CIRRIS) in Quebec City.
Martin presented the latest results from TLS data processing at the SilviLaser 2019 conference in Iguazu, Brazil: “On separating wood from leaves, accounting for leaf angle distribution, and occlusion effects in terrestrial lidar scans of dense forests”, co-authored with Jean-François Tremblay.
Martin participated in the UAS tech demo event at the UAS Centre of Excellence in Alma, Quebec, where the latest drone technologies were presented.
New publication on the use of lidar in forest ecosystem research: Béland, M., Parker, G., Sparrow, B., Harding, D., Chasmer, L., Phinn, S., Antonarakis, A., & Strahler, A. (2019). On promoting the use of lidar systems in forest ecosystem research. Forest Ecology and Management, 450, 117484.
Tristan Maurin and Alexis St-Amand joined the lab for the summer to work on our Asia deforestation monitoring project.
The lab received funding from the New Frontiers in Research Fund for creating a virtual reality experience of forest environments adapted for patients with Alzheimer’s disease (2018 competition awards).
Vivien Scholkopf is joining the lab for an internship. Vivien will be working on the estimation of forest biomass from airborne lidar.
Martin visited the Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais (INPE) in São José dos Campos, Brazil.
New publication on the automated deforestation detection system in Asia: Perbet, P., Fortin, M., Ville, A. & Béland, M. (2019). Near real-time deforestation detection in Malaysia and Indonesia using change vector analysis with three sensors. International Journal of Remote Sensing.
2018
New publication on an algorithm to coregister terrestrial lidar scans using trees as reference targets: Tremblay, J.-F. & Béland, M. (2018). Towards operational marker-free registration of terrestrial lidar data in forests. ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, 146, 430–435.
Tristan Gingras-Hill has joined the DFL as a research associate. Tristan will be working on the use of airborne lidar in forestry operations planning and wood supply predictability.
Martin completed a ground lidar survey at the Acadia Research Forest, New Brunswick. This project is a collaboration with the Canadian Wood Fibre Centre and focuses on the use of QSM modeling to estimate tree-level biomass.
Pauline gave birth to Marilou. Congratulations to mom and welcome Marilou!
Martin and Clément completed a ground lidar survey at the Morgan Monroe Forest, Indiana.
Martin completed a ground lidar survey at the Pasoh research forest, Malaysia.
Martin visited the island of Sumatra to document recent deforestation events near the Bukit Tigapuluh National Park.
Jean-Romain Roussel successfully defended his PhD thesis. Congratulations JR!
Martin presented at the 9th International Conference and Exhibition on Geospatial & Remote Sensing in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia: “A deforestation alert system based on Google Earth Engine”.
New paper in press: Jean-Romain Roussel, Martin Béland, John Caspersen, Alexis Achim. A mathematical framework to describe the effect of beam incidence angle on metrics derived from airborne LiDAR: The case of forest canopies approaching turbid medium behaviour. Remote Sensing of Environment.
Clément Joubert joined the DFL as a PhD student. Clément is working on modeling light interception in deciduous forests from terrestrial lidar measurements.
Olivier Matte joined the DFL as an MSc student. Olivier will be working with the Google Earth Engine (GEE) team on the detection of deforestation in Asia.
2017
Martin gave an invited talk to the terrestrial ecology group (Department of Biology) at the Université de Sherbrooke on the use of terrestrial lidar in upscaling fluxes from leaf to canopy level.
Jean-François Tremblay has started his MSc studies. He will be working on the use of high-density point clouds in forestry operations.
Two field campaigns were carried out this month. The first at Harvard Forest, a joint activity with the TLS RCN initiative, which aimed at comparing TLS-based estimates of wood volume and leaf area against extensive destructive sampling. The second at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) in Edgewater, MD. At both locations a 50 × 50 m plot was scanned on a 5 m grid, producing about 4 billion points per plot. Lots of processing to come!
The Riegl VZ-400 TLS instrument was received and thoroughly tested in the field in preparation for two upcoming field campaigns.
Martin presented at the EO Summit in Montreal: “On the effects of scan density and incident angle in airborne lidar data over forests”.
J-R Roussel published an R package for processing airborne lidar data: lidR: Airborne LiDAR Data Manipulation and Visualization for Forestry Applications.
J-R Roussel et al. published a paper on the effect of point density on tree height estimation from airborne lidar in Remote Sensing of Environment: Removing bias from LiDAR-based estimates of canopy height: Accounting for the effects of pulse density and footprint size.
Pauline Perbet has joined the DFL as an MSc student. Pauline will be working with the Google Earth Engine (GEE) team on the detection of deforestation in Asia.
Anouk Ville has also joined our lab for an internship with the GEE team. She is with us until September.
Martin gave an invited talk at the Institut de recherche en biologie végétale of the Université de Montréal. Watch the presentation.
Martin participated in the Royal Society Theo Murphy International Meeting “The terrestrial laser scanning revolution in forest ecology” in Chicheley, UK. He presented a poster by Jean-François Tremblay on preliminary results from his targetless registration algorithm.
Martin presented ongoing work at the Digital Forest Lab during the RCN TLS group meeting at University College London.
Moritz Bruggisser has joined the DFL as a PhD student. He recently graduated from the University of Zurich. He will be working on estimating leaf area density from terrestrial lidar in conifer forests, and on the simulation of airborne and spaceborne lidar measurements from TLS-based structure descriptions.
Funding from the John R. Evans Leaders Fund program of the Canada Foundation for Innovation has been approved to provide the DFL with a Riegl VZ-400 terrestrial laser scanner. Field work is scheduled to start in summer 2017!
2016
Martin co-organized a workshop on the use of TLS in ecology, “Terrestrial Laser Scanning for Ecology – New field technology to help measure and monitor vegetation structure”, held during the Ecological Society of Australia annual meeting in Fremantle, Western Australia, and co-sponsored by the Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN).
Martin visited the Biomet lab at UC Berkeley.
Martin co-convened a session on deriving and using forest structure information at the AGU Fall Meeting in San Francisco: “Forest Structure from Lidar: Getting and Using Structure to Monitor and Model Changes in Forest Ecosystem Functions and Services”.
Jean-François Tremblay presented his targetless TLS point cloud registration algorithm, “Un algorithme pour l’alignement sans cible de scans LiDAR terrestre en forêt”, at the TLS workshop in Sherbrooke, Quebec (6ième édition de l’atelier T-Lidar pour la communauté francophone : Utilisation de nuages de points à haute densité pour l’écologie forestière).
“Removing bias from LiDAR-based estimates of canopy height: accounting for the effects of pulse density and footprint size”, Jean-Romain Roussel, John Caspersen, Martin Béland, Alexis Achim; submitted to Remote Sensing of Environment.
All presentations from the May 2016 workshop on the use of lidar in forests are available online in French and English at atelierlidar.ffgg.ulaval.ca.