Applications Paper: Lidar Detection of the Ten Tallest Trees in the Tennessee Portion of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park

This paper describes a method for predicting the locations and heights of the ten tallest trees in the Tennessee portion of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Iterative computation tools were utilized to process the data along with the lidarderived bare earth digital elevation models and digital surface models to create canopy height models for the Tennessee portion of the park. A height threshold of 51.8 meters was chosen as the minimum value for a tree of extraordinary height. Ten potential sites containing tall trees were identified using this methodology, and seven of the top ten ranking trees’ heights were field measured using accepted forestry methodology. The trees detected using these methods are potentially the tallest trees ever measured on the East Coast of the United States. These methods show that unique tall trees can be successfully detected in a large, heterogeneous forest area using lidar data.