Vegetation plays an important role in stabilizing the soil and decreasing fluvial erosion. In certain cases, vegetation increases the accumulation of fine sediments. Efficient and accurate methods are required for mapping and monitoring changes in the fluvial environment. Here, we develop an area-based approach for mapping and monitoring the vegetation structure along a river channel. First, a ...

The combination of GPS-Telemetry and resource selection functions is widely used to analyze animal habitat selection. Rapid large-scale assessment of vegetation structure allows bridging the requirements of habitat selection studies on grain size and extent, particularly in forest habitats. For roe deer, the cold period in winter forces individuals to optimize their trade off in searching for f...

To determine the effects of ozone (O3) on the canopy carbon budget, we investigated photosynthesis and respiration of leaves of Siebold's beech saplings under free air O3 exposure (60 nmol mol(-1), during daytime) in relation to the within-canopy light gradient; we then calculated the canopy-level photosynthetic carbon gain (PCG) and respiratory carbon loss (RCL) using a canopy photosynthesis m...

Accurately assessing terrestrial gross primary productivity (GPP) is crucial for characterizing the climate-carbon cycle. Remotely sensing the photochemical reflectance index (PRI) across vegetation functional types and spatiotemporal scales has received increasing attention for monitoring photosynthetic performance and simulating GPP over the last two decades. The factors confounding PRI varia...

The Lowland Forest is one of the most disturbed and fragile ecosystems in the Atlantic Forest biome, yet little is known regarding its successional trajectory and resilience. We evaluated changes in species assemblages and forest structure of the canopy and understory along a successional gradient (young 21-yrs old forest, immature 34-yrs old forest and late successional 59-yrs old forest) aimi...

This paper assesses the combined effect of field plot size and LiDAR density on the estimation of four forest structure attributes: volume, total biomass, basal area and canopy cover. A total of 21 different plot sizes were considered, obtained by decreasing the field measured plot radius value from 25 to 5 m with regular intervals of 1 m. LiDAR data densities were simulated by randomly removin...

Digital repeat photography is becoming widely used for near-surface remote sensing of vegetation. Canopy greenness, which has been used extensively for phenological applications, can be readily quantified from camera images. Important questions remain, however, as to whether the observed changes in canopy greenness are directly related to changes in leaf-level traits, changes in canopy structur...

[1] This study investigates the impacts of canopy structure specification on modeling net radiation (Rn), latent heat flux (LE) and net photosynthesis (An) by coupling two contrasting radiation transfer models with a two-leaf photosynthesis model for a maturing loblolly pine stand near Durham, North Carolina, USA. The first radiation transfer model is based on a uniform canopy representation (U...

The change pattern and trend of soil moisture (SM) in the Wuding River basin, Loess Plateau, China is explored based on the simulated long-term SM data from 1956 to 2004 using an eco-hydrological process-based model, Vegetation Interface Processes model, VIP. In-situ SM observations together with a remotely sensed SM dataset retrieved by the Vienna University of Technology are used to validate ...