Harmonising vegetation structure metrics across Europe through Large-scale airborne LiDAR processing
From 11 to 13 March 2026, LifeWatch ERIC was involved in a three-day technical workshop on large-scale airborne LiDAR processing for vegetation structure analysis.
The event was hosted at SustainaLab (University of Amsterdam), and organised by W. Daniel Kissling, Yifang Shi, and Jinhu Wang as part of the EU-funded Mambo Project (Modern Approaches to the Monitoring of BiOdiversity), an initiative that develops remote-sensing and AI-based tools to improve biodiversity monitoring across Europe. LifeWatch ERIC, the Netherlands eScience Center, and SURF contributed their expertise to the event programme.
Over the three days, the event brought together 21 researchers, data scientists, and remote sensing specialists working across ecology, forestry, and Earth observation. LifeWatch ERIC VLIC members Zhiming Zhao, Koen Greuell, and Gabriel Pelouze participated with the presentation “Notebook-as-a-VRE (NaaVRE): a virtual research environment” (Zhiming Zhao) and a hands-on practical session “Laserfarm in NaaVRE” (Gabriel Pelouze, Koen Greuell).
The practical trainings focused on running Laserfarm workflows on HPC infrastructure, using NaaVRE for LiDAR processing, extracting vegetation structure metrics in Google Colab or local Jupyter environments, and delineating individual trees from 3D LiDAR point clouds.
The final discussions explored how to harmonise vegetation structure metrics across Europe, and laid the groundwork for developing a roadmap for large-scale airborne LiDAR processing that supports biodiversity monitoring, forest analysis, and ecosystem research. Participants shared the common goal of moving from local LiDAR processing, to reproducible and scalable workflows.
The event was also an opportunity for LifeWatch ERIC to gather feedback to further improve NaaVRE, especially in terms of scalability, of the ability to customise configurations, support for deep learning models, and overall flexibility and user experience.
To read more about this workshop, visit the official event page: https://www.mambo-project.eu/events/workshop-large-scale-and-scalable-processing-airborne-lidar-vegetation-structure-analysis
Picture from LinkedIn