Forest remote sensing in Canada and the Individual Tree Crown (ITC) approach to forest inventories

After a brief description of Canada's forest situation and the role of the federal government in forestry, some Natural Resources Canada' country-wide project will be introduced. These include the National Forest Inventories (past and present), the National Forest Information System, the EOSD programs to map land cover, monitor change and evaluate biomass, mostly from Canada-wide coverages with Landsat images. The accounting of carbon and the monitoring of deforestation at a map scale level will also be introduced. The second and most significant part of this paper will describe our Individual Tree Crown (ITC) approach to forest inventories used with high spatial resolution images (better than 1 m/pixel). Techniques for individual crown delineation, species classification and regrouping into forest stands that are leading to a semi-automatic production of forest inventories will be described. A locally adaptive technique for tree counts, mostly reserved for young regenerating areas, will also be presented. The synergy of multispectral and LIDAR data (at many levels) will be examined and, the normalization of spectral values within and among aerial images will be considered.