Forest aboveground biomass (AGB) is an important indicator for characterizing forest ecosystem structures and functions. Therefore, how to effectively investigate forest AGB is a vital mission. Airborne laser scanning (ALS) has been demonstrated as an effective way to support investigation and operational applications among a wide range of applications in the forest inventory. Moreover, three-dimensional structure information relating to AGB can be acquired by airborne laser scanning. Many studies estimated AGB from variables that were extracted from point cloud data, but few of them took full advantage of variables related to tree crowns to estimate the AGB. In this study, the main objective was to evaluate and compare the capabilities of different metrics derived from point clouds obtained from ALS. Particularly, individual tree-based alpha-shape, along with other traditional and commonly used plot-level height and intensity metrics, have been used from airborne laser scanning data. We took the random forest and multiple stepwise linear regression to estimate the AGB. By comparing AGB estimates with field measurements, our results showed that the best approach is mixed metrics, and the best estimation model is random forest (R² = 0.713, RMSE = 21.064 t/ha, MAE = 15.445 t/ha), which indicates that alpha-shape may be a good alternative method to improve AGB estimation accuracy. This method provides an effective solution for estimating aboveground biomass from airborne laser scanning.

Digital aerial photogrammetry (DAP) has emerged as an alternative to airborne laser scanning (ALS) for forest inventory applications, as it offers a low-cost and flexible three-dimensional (3D) point cloud. Unlike the forest inventory attributes (e.g., tree height and diameter at breast height), the relative ability of DAP and ALS in predicting canopy structural variables (i.e., canopy cover and leaf area index (LAI)) has not been sufficiently investigated by previous studies. In this study, we comprehensively compared the canopy cover and LAI estimates using DAP- and ALS-based methods over 166 selected tropical forest sample plots with seven different tree species and forest types. We also explored the relationship between field-measured aboveground biomass (AGB) and the LAI estimates. The airborne LAI estimates were subsequently compared with the Sentinel-2-based LAI values that were retrieved using a one-dimensional radiative transfer model. The results demonstrated that the DAP-based method generally overestimated the two canopy variables compared to ALS-based methods but with relatively high correlations regardless of forest type and species (R² of 0.80 for canopy cover and R² of 0.76 for LAI). Under different forest types and species, the R² of canopy cover and LAI range from 0.64 to 0.89 and from 0.54 to 0.87, respectively. Apparently, different correlations between AGB and LAI were found for different forest types and species where the mixed coniferous and broad-leaved forest shows the best correlation with R² larger than 0.70 for both methods. The comparison with satellite retrievals verified that the ALS-based estimates are more consistent with Sentinel-2-based estimates than DAP-based estimates. We concluded that DAP data failed to provide analogous results to ALS data for canopy variable estimation in tropical forests.