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...
This paper describes the atmospheric correction (AC) component of the Multi-Angle Implementation of Atmospheric Correction algorithm (MAIAC) which introduces a new way to compute parameters of the Ross-Thick Li-Sparse (RTLS) Bi-directional reflectance distribution function (BRDF), spectral surface albedo and bidirectional reflectance factors (BRF) from satellite measurements obtained by the Moderate...
Tropical rainforests are significant contributors to the global cycles of energy, water and carbon. As a result, monitoring of the vegetation status over regions such as Amazônia has been a long standing interest of Earth scientists trying to determine the effect of climate change and anthropogenic disturbance on the tropical...
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...
High spatiotemporal resolution satellite imagery is useful for natural resource management and monitoring for land-use and land-cover change and ecosystem dynamics. However, acquisitions from a single satellite can be limited, due to trade-offs in either spatial or temporal resolution. The spatial and temporal adaptive reflectance fusion model (STARFM) and the...
The Mongolian Steppe is one of the largest remaining grassland ecosystems. Recent studies have reported widespread
decline of vegetation across the steppe and about 70% of this ecosystem is now considered degraded. Among
the scientific community there has been an active debate about whether the observed degradation is related to...
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...
We show that the vegetation canopy of the Amazon rainforest is
highly sensitive to changes in precipitation patterns and that
reduction in rainfall since 2000 has diminished vegetation greenness
across large parts of Amazonia. Large-scale directional
declines in vegetation greenness may indicate decreases in carbon
uptake and substantial changes in...