Airborne laser scanning in Białowieża Primeval Forest
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2020-10-04

Białowieża Forest is one of largest forested areas in Europe. In total, it occupies nearly 1,500 km2, of which 42% is in our country and the rest is located in Belarus. This area is almost entirely considered as protected, including strict reserve in the form of the Bialowieża National Park. Such situation conducive to maintaining the remnants of an older settlement, but forest cover made the area almost inaccessible for archaeologists. Change of this state provide technology development of airborne laser scanning (ALS). Launched at the end of 2016 project "Cultural and natural heritage of Białowieża Forest" is aimed at a comprehensive, interdisciplinary ex-amination of the archaeological resources of the forest with the background of nature sciences. During the project, three different point clouds were used, with a nominal density of 4, 6 and 12 points per square meter . The clouds also differed in the size of the laser beam footprint, form 50 centimetres for two first point clouds and about 12 centimetres in case of the last one. As research has shown, changing the scanning parameters has a large impact on the ability to detect archaeological sites, but also on the quality of analysis and the conclusions. As the re-search shows, the cloud of points has to be adapted to the needs of the research and data with a density of 4 points per meter and 50 cm of footprint are sufficient for detection, but in analysis more sophisticated small forms of terrain, better quality is needed.


Michał Jakubczak, Michał Szubski, Janusz Budziszewski, Kamil Niedziółka