Prior studies of a broad array of seed plants have reported strong correlations among leaf life span, specific leaf area, nitrogen concentration, and carbon assimilation rates, which have been interpreted as evidence of coordinated leaf physiological strategies. However, it is not known whether these relationships reflect patterns of evolutionary convergence, or whether they are due to contrast...

Land use has an important role influencing stream ecosystem processes, such as leaf litter breakdown. Here, we assessed rates of leaf litter breakdown in low-order tropical streams draining forest, agriculture, and urban land uses in Puerto Rico. To measure leaf breakdown rates, we placed litter bags made of coarse mesh in nine streams, three for each land use type. At each stream, we measured ...

Monitoring plants using leaf feature detection is a challenging perception task because different leaves, even from the same plant, may have very different shapes, sizes and deformations. In addition, leaves may be occluded by other leaves making it hard to determine some of their characteristics. In this paper we use a Time-of-Flight (ToF) camera mounted on a robot arm to acquire the depth inf...