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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
The 3-PGS (physiological principles for predicting growth using satellite data) model generates monthly estimates of transpiration, photosynthesis, and net primary production (NPP), the latter derived as a fixed proportion (0.47) of gross photosynthesis. To assess the reliability of a simplified process model (3-PGS) to predict the productive capacity of coniferous...
A change in climate is known to affect seasonal timing (phenology) of the life stages of poikilothermic organisms whose development depends on temperature. Less understood is the potential for even greater disruption to the life cycle when a phenology shift exposes photoperiod-sensitive life stages to new day lengths. We present...
In this paper we extend the results of the research started by the first author in which Karlin-McGregor diagonalization of certain reversible Markov chains over countably infinite general state spaces by orthogonal polynomials was used to estimate the rate of convergence to a stationary distribution. We use a method of...