Geometrical models of trees in the field of computational forestry are nowadays referred to as Quantitative Structure Models (QSMs). The capability of those models exceeds pure volume estimation of trees. If the volume of a tree is multiplied with density values the above ground biomass (AGB) of a tree can be derived non destructively.

Instead of being limited to predict the AGB like statistical or voxel based approaches QSMs give also insight into internal biomass distributions of a tree.

The geometrical building blocks of such models are commonly cylinders fitted into terrrestrial laser scan point clouds.

SimpleTree is an open source tool to build QSMs from TLS clouds (SimpleTree homepage). The released version is based on PCL 1.8.0.