re-vegetation of bare soil is believed to increase, or at least maintain the organic matter levels of soil. the aim of this study was to investigate the soil characteristics changes, nutrient pool sizes and their availability under mid canopy, and canopy gap positions of saltbush in an area re-vegetated with atriplex lentiformis. some of the physical and chemical soil characteristics (the parti...

Bridging the Scale Gap from Leaf to Canopy in Biosphere-Atmosphere Gas and Particle Exchanges

Terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with digital cameras have attracted much attention from the forestry community as potential tools for forest inventories and forest monitoring. This research fills a knowledge gap about the viability and dissimilarities of using these technologies for measuring the top of canopy structure in tropical forests. In an em...

This study explores the relationship between laser waveforms and canopy structure parameters and the effects of the spatial arrangement of canopy structure on this relationship through a geometric optical model. Studying laser waveforms for such plant canopies is needed for the advanced retrieval of three-dimensional (3-D) canopy structure parameters from the vegetation canopy lidar (VCL) missi...

Investigating patterns of phylogenetic structure across different life stages of tree species in forests is crucial to understanding forest community assembly, and investigating forest gap influence on the phylogenetic structure of forest regeneration is necessary for understanding forest community assembly. Here, we examine the phylogenetic structure of tree species across life stages from see...

Terrestrial laser scanners (TLS) are now capable of collecting 3d data clouds consisting of the x,y,z coordinates of several million laser hits, plus information on return intensity and, in some cases, target colour. TLS collect data at sub-centimetre resolution at a range of zenith view angles. This paper describes the results of a series of experiments in which a TLS was used to measure the t...

An algorithm has been proposed to estimate the leaf area index (LAI) and canopy closure of forest canopies from the distribution of gap fraction measured by an LAI-2000 plant canopy analyser by inverting a forest gap fraction theoretical formula. The algorithm is based on the idea that the canopy closure is estimated from the reading of canopy analyser in the near-zenith ring. However, the meas...

Treefall gaps are the major source of disturbance in most tropical forests. The frequency and size of these gaps have important implications for forest ecosystem processes as they can influence the functional trait distribution of tree communities, stand-level aboveground biomass and productivity. However, we still know little about the relative importance of environmental drivers of gap distur...

This paper evaluates the potential of a terrestrial laser scanner (TLS) to characterize forest canopy fuel characteristics at plot level. Several canopy properties, namely canopy height, canopy cover, canopy base height and fuel strata gapwere estimated. Different approaches were tested to avoid the effect of canopy shadowing on canopy height estimation caused by deployment of the TLS below the...