Using 3D Point Clouds to Calculate Tree Volumes

April 4, 2018
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Updated February 9, 2026
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1 min read

A waterfall cascading down a rocky cliff, surrounded by dense green vegetation.
It’s difficult to use a video to explain 3D point cloud workflows, but this one from the UK does an excellent job with visually demonstrating how tree volumes can be calculated using 3D scanned data. Like many challenges with remote sensing calculating volume has been one of those difficult to achieve goals, but it seems fair to say that if you are willing to put in the time you can get excellent results – finally.

Forest Research, Tampere University of Technology and Université Grenoble Alpes have been working together to optimize measurements from forest sample plots using terrestrial LiDAR in order to produce more accurate, more detailed, timely and harmonized information that can be fed into national and international forest information systems.

This animation shows details of the data processing chain for tree volume and biomass assessments.

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