Two weeks ago, we conducted a field campaign in the frame of a 3DGeo Sensor Practical course to acquire 3D point clouds of Heidelberg’s tallest trees, Sequoias planted in the Arboretum I (see our blog post).
Today, we present the prepared data in our new online point cloud viewer based on potree:
https://3dweb.geog.uni-heidelberg.de/potree/scenes/sequoia.html
A few stills take you around the most prominent tree of the scene, showcasing the diameter of one of the world’s largest Sequoia, the General Sherman Tree (U.S.A.), using stems on the ground:
The following animation shows how massive these trees really are, and even allows a peek below the ground and into the stem:
But is this tree really the largest of the Sequoias in Heidelberg’s Aboretum I? You can use the interactive point cloud viewer to measure and find out!
Stay tuned: Later in the Summer, we are planning a UAV acquisition using a laser scanner mounted on a drone to get an additional perspective from above the canopy and capture more detailed point cloud data.