We investigated the potential use of airborne light detection and ranging (LiDAR) data to predict key wood fiber properties from extrinsic indicators in lodgepole pine leading forest stands located in the foothills of central Alberta, Canada. Six wood fiber attributes (wood density, cell perimeter, cell coarseness, mature fiber length, microfibril...
Understanding canopy radiation regimes is critical to successfully modeling vegetation growth and function.
For instance, the vertical distribution of photosynthetically active radiation (PAR) affects vegetation growth,
informative upon carbon and energy cycling. Availing upon advances in information capture and computing
power, geometrically explicit modeling of forest structure becomes increasingly possible....
Surface energy balance is a major determinant of land surface temperature and the Earth's climate. To date, there is no approach that can produce effective, physically consistent, global and multi-decadal energy–water flux data over land. Net radiation (R[subscript n]) can be quantified regionally using satellite retrievals of surface reflectance and...
A process-based forest growth model, 3-PG (Physiological Principles Predicting
Growth), parameterized with values of soil properties constrained by satellite-derived
estimates of maximum leaf area index (LAI[subscript max]), was run for Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga
menziesii) to contrast the extent to which site growth potential might vary across western
North America between a...
Vegetation carbon uptake and respiration constitute the largest carbon cycle of the planet with an annual turnover
in the order of 120 GT. Currently, neither ecosystem carbon uptake (through photosynthesis) nor ecosystem
carbon release (through respiration) can be measured directly during the daytime. Instead, flux-tower measurements
rely on nighttime respiration...
Understanding plant photosynthesis, or Gross Primary Production (GPP), is a crucial aspect of quantifying the terrestrial carbon cycle. Remote sensing approaches, in particular multi-angular spectroscopy, have proven successful for studying relationships between canopy-reflectance and plant-physiology processes, thus providing a mechanism to scale up. However, many different instrumentation designs exist and...
Free and open access to satellite imagery and value-added data products have revolutionized the role of remote sensing in Earth system science. Nonetheless, rapid changes in the global environment pose challenges to the science community that are increasingly difficult to address using data from single satellite sensors or platforms due...