This proposal concerns the visit at the Canadian Forest Service - Pacific Forestry Centre (CFS-PFC), BC, Canada for Ph.D. student Nadja Thieme. The visit at CFS-PFC is an integrated part of Nadja Thieme's Ph.D. project. She will accomplish research tasks on the development of an algorithm in order to automatically detect individual small trees in the transition to the alpine zone based on airborne laser scanning, in collaboration with the Forest Geomatics research group at CFS-PFC. The Forest Geomatics re search group, lead by Dr. Michael Wulder, possesses high level competence in the area of using earth observation data in forest inventory. A research visit for 4 months, i.e., from 1st September to 31st December, 2010, is planned.