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Canopy gaps are pivotal for monitoring forest ecosystem dynamics. Conventional field methods are time-consuming and labor intensive, making them impractical for regional mapping and systematic monitoring. Gaps may be delineated using airborne lidar or aerial photographs acquired from a manned aircraft. However, high cost in data acquisition and low flexibility in flight logistics significantly reduce the accessibility of the approaches. To address these issues, this study utilized miniature light detection and ranging (lidar) onboard an unmanned aircraft vehicle (UAV_lidar) to map forest canopy gaps of young and mature broadleaf forest plantations along the coast of northeastern Taiwan. This study also used UAV photographs (UAV_photo) for the same task for comparison purposes. The canopy height models were derived from UAV_lidar and UAV_photo with the availability of a digital terrain model from UAV_lidar. Canopy gap distributions of the forests were modeled with the power-law zeta and Weibull distributions. The performance of UAV_lidar was found to be superior to UAV_photo in delineating the gap distribution through ground observation, mainly due to lidar’s ability to detect small canopy gaps. There were apparent differences of the power-law zeta distributions for the young and mature forest stands with the exponents <i>λ</i> of 1.36 (1.45) and 1.71 (1.61) for UAV_lidar and UAV_photo, respectively, suggesting that larger canopy gaps were present within the younger stands. The canopy layer of mature forest stands was homogeneous, and the size distributions of both sensors and methods were insensitive to the spatial extent of the monitored area. Contrarily, the young forests were heterogeneous, but only UAV_lidar with the Weibull distribution responded to the change of spatial extent. This study demonstrates that using the Weibull distribution to analyze canopy gap from high-spatial resolution UAV_lidar may provide detailed information of regional forest canopy of coastal broadleaf forests.