Voxel Volumes and Biomass: Estimating Vegetation Volume and Litter Accumulation of Exotic Annual Grasses Using Automated Ultra-High-Resolution SfM and Advanced Classification Techniques.

In much of the northern Great Basin of the western United States, rangelands, and semi-arid ecosystems invaded by exotic annual grasses such as cheatgrass () and medusahead () are experiencing an increasingly short fire cycle, which is compounding and persistent. Improving and expanding ground-based field methods for measuring the above-ground biomass (AGB) may enable more sample collections across a landscape and over succession regimes and better harmonize with other remote sensing techniques. Developments and increased adoption of unoccupied aerial systems (UAS) and instrumentation for vegetation monitoring enable greater understanding of vegetation in many ecosystems.