The data in the graph support the authors' point in paragraph five (lines 47–58 (“As the new kid on the block, LiDAR has been tacked onto the back end—initially thought of as kind of large-scale helper to field surveys. Carbon estimates from the field have been treated as something inherently closer to the real thing than measurements made by LiDAR—ground “Truth” with a capital “T”. This is perhaps understandable historically, but vis-à-vis actual carbon, there is no such thing as ground truth: both field and LiDAR efforts rely on allometry to convert measurements into carbon estimates. Prior to using these measurements for carbon estimation, they exist as standardized, spatially explicit, archivable and verifiable data—the needed substrate for a REDD*-type accounting program.”)
) about the uses of LiDAR by