Using terrestrial LiDAR to measure water erosion on stony plots under simulated rainfall

Terrestrial LiDAR scanning (TLS) technology is widely used to detect terrain elevation changes. This study examines the potential use of terrestrial LiDAR to measure erosion on small experimental plots at high resolution. Multitemporal TLS scans were conducted at six positions around plots (12 m²) with three slope treatments through 11 simulated rainfall applications. Surface elevation changes were quantified by comparing scans between rainfall simulations, and elevation changes greater than the level of detection were used to obtain volumetric change estimations. Erosion mass was estimated both by using soil bulk density and the density of sediment collected in runoff, and then compared to the erosion estimated from the runoff samples. Results showed: (1) with the aid of fixed reference controls in the form of concrete target surfaces of varying roughness, registration accuracy was better than 1 mm and mean level of change detection was less than 2.2 mm; (2) the average absolute relative errors of TLS-estimated eroded mass ranged from 6.8% to 31.8%, with greater values on 5% slope; (3) the TLS-estimated erosion accuracy was affected by erosion magnitude, the utilized material density and number of scan positions, and a grid size of 10 mm was found to be appropriate for this scale to estimate the volumetric changes; (4) the number of scan positions could be reduced to three while not significantly impacting volumetric change estimations; and (5) elevating the scanner resulted in much better accuracy for eroded mass estimations. This study suggests that using LiDAR to monitor soil erosion at the plot scale is feasible, and provides guidance about the level of accuracy one might expect in doing so. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.