We evaluate whether current procedures used in fire behavior prediction models such as FVS-FFE provide predictions of CBD and CBH suitable for evaluating fire behavior in response to fuel treatments. Currently, FFE-FVS uses a geographic non-specific set of tree allometries and assumes a uniform distribution of crown mass when estimating CBH and CBD. We develop allometric equations to predict cr...

Although there have been several studies on the spectral characteristics related to leaf water content, it remains unclear whether the spectral property of leaves can be extended to the canopy-level. In this study, we attempt to compare the spectral characteristics of forest vegetation in moderate drought condition observed by laboratory measurement and satellite hyperspectral image data. Spect...

Operational assessment of forest structure is an on-going challenge for land managers, particularly over large, remote or inaccessible areas. Here, we present an easily adopted method for generating a continuous map of canopy height at a 30 m resolution, demonstrated over 2.9 million hectares of highly heterogeneous forest (canopy height 0–70 m) in Victoria, Australia. A two-stage approach was ...

Climbing plants are a key component of rainforests, but mechanistic approaches to their distribution and abundance are scarce. In a southern temperate rainforest, we addressed whether the dominance of climbing plants across light environments is associated with the expression of ecophysiological traits. In mature forest and canopy gaps, we measured leaf size, specific leaf area, photosynthetic ...

Recent work has established the utility of waveform sampling lidar for predicting forest structural attributes. Nevertheless, serious obstacles to its wide-spread use still exist. They include the lack of waveform sampling lidar sensors capable of measuring forest canopy structure over large extents, and the practical difficulty of developing widely applicable relationships to predict forest st...

The creation of gaps in forest canopies can dramatically change the microclimate and soil water balance which strongly influences the process of regeneration and biodiversity within forest ecosystems. Hence, understanding the microclimatic conditions in canopy gaps is a prerequisite in developing and improving techniques for forest management and conservation practices. However, information is ...

Fire researchers and managers need accurate, reliable, and efficiently-obtained data for the development and application of crown fire behavior models. In particular, reliable estimates of critical canopy structure characteristics, including canopy bulk density, canopy height, canopy base height, and canopy fuel weight are required to accurately map fuel loading and model fire behavior over the...

The divergence of horizontal radiation in vegetation canopies is generally considered to be of negligible consequence to 1) algorithms designed for the physically-based interpretation of space borne observations, and 2) field campaigns aiming at the validation of derived surface products, like FAPAR and albedo. However, non-zero horizontal radiation balances are likely to occur if the internal ...

A key part of tropical forest spatial complexity is the vertical stratification of biodiversity, with widely differing communities found in higher rainforest strata compared to terrestrial levels. Despite this, our understanding of how human disturbance may differentially affect biodiversity across vertical strata of tropical forests has been slow to develop. For the first time, how the pattern...