BIOMASS EVALUATION WITH THE HELP OF LIDAR DATA
FOR SONTEA-FORTUNA LACUSTRINE COMPLEX, DANUBE DELTA

Marian Mierlă, Ion Grigoras, Mihai Doroftei,  Adrian Constantinescu,  Iulian Nichersu, Cristian Trifanov
Danube Delta National Institute for Research and Development, Tulcea, Romania

Abstract

More and more the need for energy is bigger and bigger and the traditional sources are diminishing. This situation leads to the need of searching new sources of energy that could be renewable. One of these kinds of energy sources could be the biomass. The biomass is the traditional source of energy for herbivorous animals and also as a combustion source for the cold season for human settlements. Thus is important to have an expeditious method to evaluate the biomass from the Danube Delta knowing that in this area there are good conditions for big yearly amount of biomass. The place to be applied this method for Romania is the Danube Delta, fluvial delta to be more precisely. The importance of the area consists in the fact that here is the biggest and the most compact area of reed, one of the plants that contribute to the biomass of the Danube Delta. The paper is aiming to rise the knowledge about the potential of the biomass production in the studied area and to be able to respond to the request of the biomass in a sustainable way. For this, in this paper, there were taken into account LiDAR data in order to obtain Digital Terrain Model (DTM) and Digital Elevation Model (DEM). As a support of the studies it was used the orthophotos in InfraRed (IR) to assess and delimit the vegetation areas. By knowing the height and the surface of the vegetation it was calculated the volume of the biomass together with the air between the plant parts. These are the first steps to have a complete assessment of the biomass.

Keywords: Danube Delta, biomass assessment, LiDAR data, DTM (Digital Terrain Model), DEM (Digital Elevation Model)