Considerations for Assessing Functional Forest Diversity in High-Dimensional Trait Space Derived from Drone-Based Lidar

Remotely sensed morphological traits have been used to assess functional diversity of forests. This approach is potentially spatial-scale-independent. Lidar data collected from the ground or by drone at a high point density provide an opportunity to consider multiple ecologically meaningful traits at fine-scale ecological units such as individual trees. However, high-spatial-resolution and multi-trait datasets used to calculate functional diversity can produce large volumes of data that can be computationally resource demanding. Functional diversity can be derived through a trait probability density (TPD) approach. Computing TPD in a high-dimensional trait space is computationally intensive. Reductions of the number of dimensions through trait selection and principal component analysis (PCA) may reduce the computational load. Trait selection can facilitate identification of ecologically meaningful traits and reduce inter-trait correlation. This study investigates whether kernel density estimator (KDE) or one-class support vector machine (SVM) may be computationally more efficient in calculating TPD. Four traits were selected for input into the TPD: canopy height, effective number of layers, plant to ground ratio, and box dimensions. When simulating a high-dimensional trait space, we found that TPD derived from KDE was more efficient than using SVM when the number of input traits was high. For five or more traits, applying dimension reduction techniques (e.g., PCA) are recommended. Furthermore, the kernel size for TPD needs to be appropriate for the ecological target unit and should be appropriate for the number of traits. The kernel size determines the required number of data points within the trait space. Therefore, 3–5 traits require a kernel size of at least 7×7pixels. This study contributes to improving the quality of TPD calculations based on traits derived from remote sensing data. We provide a set of recommendations based on our findings. This has the potential to improve reliability in identifying biodiversity hotspots.