• Journal of the Korean Society of Environmental Restoration Technology
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• v.22 no.6
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• pp.1-14
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• 2019

Carbon storage is one of the regulating ecosystem services provided by urban street trees. It is important that evaluating the economic value of ecosystem services accurately. The carbon storage of street trees was calculated by measuring the morphological parameter on the field. As the method is labor-intensive and time-consuming for the macro-scale research, remote sensing has been more widely used. The airborne Light Detection And Ranging (LiDAR) is used in obtaining the point clouds data of a densely planted area and extracting individual trees for the carbon storage estimation. However, the LiDAR has limitations such as high cost and complicated operations. In addition, trees change over time they need to be frequently. Therefore, Structure from Motion (SfM) photogrammetry with unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) is a more suitable method for obtaining point clouds data. In this paper, a UAV loaded with a digital camera was employed to take oblique aerial images for generating point cloud of street trees. We extracted the diameter of breast height (DBH) from generated point cloud data to calculate the carbon storage. We compared DBH calculated from UAV data and measured data from the field in the selected area. The calculated DBH was used to estimate the carbon storage of street trees in the study area using a regression model. The results demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of applying UAV imagery and SfM technique to the carbon storage estimation of street trees. The technique can contribute to efficiently building inventories of the carbon storage of street trees in urban areas.