ABSTRACT
In addition to other remote sensing methods, LiDAR has been used for many years in temperate regions or open tropical agricultural landscapes to detect signs of past human activities. The improvement of sensors, and therefore of LiDAR’s ability to penetrate dense vegetation, allows us now to produce digital elevation models (DEMs) that are precise enough to reveal topographic artefacts over large tropical rainforest tracts. We discuss here the requirements for producing such DEMs and detail how they can be used to detect particular landscape-scale pre-Columbian features known as ring-ditched sites in French Guiana.
