Questions: How do fire frequency, tree canopy cover, and their interactions influence cover of grasses, forbs and understorey woody plants in oak savannas and woodlands? Location: Minnesota, USA. Methods: We measured plant functional group cover and tree canopy cover on permanent plots within a long-term prescribed fire frequency experiment and used hierarchical linear modeling to assess plant ...

Nurse plant facilitation in stressful environments can produce an environment with relatively low stress under its canopy. These nurse plants may produce the conditions promoting intense competition between coexisting species under the canopy, and canopies may establish stress gradients, where stress increases toward the edge of the canopy. Competition and facilitation on these stress gradients...

In this study, the structurally heterogeneous canopy of a 12-ha plot in an old-growth Douglas-fir forest was analyzed using three-dimensional (3-D) canopy modeling, geographic information system (GIS), and spatial statistics. Using this approach, we were able to depict how species composition and spatial distribution affect the 3-D structure of canopies. We were also able to slice the canopy an...

—Canopy coverage is a key variable used to characterize forest structure. In addition, the light transmitted through the canopy is an important ecological indicator of plant and animal habitat and understory climate conditions. A common groundbased method used to document canopy coverage is to take digital photographs from below the canopy. To assist with analyzing below-canopy photographs, the...

Calibrations of indirect methods for estimating leaf area are usually based on small data sets and are often species-specific and may even be stand-specific. We used the Licor LAI-2000 plant canopy analyser (PCA) as a reference to calibrate leaf area measurements based on hemispherical photography. Ten stands of 6–8 year-old, plantation grown Tasmanian bluegum (Eucalyptus globulus Labill.) in W...

A reasonable main branch opening angle can improve the canopy light environment of a tree, change direction nutrient transport, and promote formation flower buds. In this experiment, 3-year-old ‘Lu Hong 618’ was used as test material to study effects different angles (three treatments: 45°, 65°, 85°) on distribution, characteristics, fruit quality, bud quality ‘Y’-shaped peach trees. The findin...

Two tributary streams (Fourmile branch and Pen branch) located on the US Department of Energy’s Savannah river site in west-central South Carolina, USA received thermal discharges from nuclear production reactors for over 30 years. Effluent releases produced stream water temperatures of over 50°C and stream flows of ten times above their base level. Consequently, existing plant and animal commu...

Canopy water content is a dynamic quantity that depends on the balance between water losses from transpiration and water uptake from the soil. Absorption of shortwave radiation by water is determined by various frequencies that match overtones of fundamental bending and stretching molecular transitions. Leaf water potential and relative water content are important variables for determining wate...

Predictions of chlorophyll content (chla+b) or any other canopy biophysical parameter from airborne or satellite canopy reflectance are generally carried out through four different methodologies: i) directly studying the statistical relationships between ground-measured biochemical data and canopy-measured reflectance (Johnson et al., 1994; Matson et al., 1994); ii) applying the leaf-level rela...

Plant canopy structure can strongly affect crop functions such as yield and stress tolerance, and canopy size is an important aspect of canopy structure. Manual assessment of canopy size is laborious and imprecise, and cannot measure multi-dimensional traits such as projected leaf area and canopy volume. Field-based high throughput phenotyping systems with imaging capabilities can rapidly acqui...