LiDAR

Counting and locating 817 trees in a picnic area

Çerkezköy, Tekirdağ, Turkey · 2026

The manager of a picnic area in Çerkezköy (Tekirdağ) needed to know how many trees it held and where each one stood. The MapSurvey team answered with a drone LiDAR scan and a drawing of 817 positions.

LiDAR tree inventory in a picnic area in Çerkezköy, cover image

The question to answer

This was not a standard topographic plan but an inventory: the exact number of trees and the coordinate of every trunk, to plan maintenance, pruning and new planting without walking the whole area with a GNSS rover.

Why LiDAR for a tree count

In an orthophoto crowns overlap and a cluster of trees reads as one blob. A LiDAR cloud is three dimensional: once the ground is removed, every trunk and crown stands as its own body inside the cloud and can be isolated and positioned one by one. That is what was done here: separate the terrain, isolate each tree, assign a position. As a general rule this works better than counting on imagery when the stand is dense or the crowns touch.

What was delivered

Three files that turn the cloud into an inventory the parks department can use.

  • Drawing locating 817 trees (NetCAD, DWG)

    Georeferenced inventory for maintenance, pruning and planting plans.

  • 3 cm orthophoto

    Current image of the area to identify each tree and the land uses.

  • Terrain model

    Height base for paths, drainage and new seating areas.

If you have a similar project in Spain

Ask for the position drawing in ETRS89 and the UTM zone of your municipality, as DWG or DXF, with an identifier per tree you can link to an attribute table. Also request the classified cloud as LAS or LAZ if you want to measure heights or crown diameters later. To quote, we need the perimeter of the area as KMZ, the type of trees and whether shrubs should be included in the inventory.

Project images

Perspective view of the LiDAR point cloud of the picnic area with isolated trees
Perspective view of the LiDAR point cloud of the picnic area with isolated trees
Drone orthophoto at 3 cm of the wooded picnic area
Drone orthophoto at 3 cm of the wooded picnic area
Terrain model of the picnic area with hillshade and contours
Terrain model of the picnic area with hillshade and contours

A project by our technical partner

This work was carried out by MapSurvey, our technical partner in Turkey, measuring since 2015. In Spain, SensorFlight handles the fieldwork and the client relationship, and MapSurvey processes the data and delivers the models. Samet Bayram Gulyol, GIS expert at MapSurvey, is SensorFlight's technical lead.

See the original project sheet on mapsurvey.eu

Have a similar project?

Tell us the area, the timeframe and the deliverables you need and we will prepare a proposal.

Request a quote

info@sensorflight.com · +34 690 00 02 13