[1] Vegetation affects the climate by modifying the energy, momentum, and hydrologic balance of the land surface. Soil-vegetation-atmosphere transfer (SVAT) schemes explicitly consider the role of vegetation in affecting water and energy balance by taking into account its physiological properties, in particular, leaf area index (LAI) and stomatal conductance. These two physiological properties ...

The choice of sampling methods is a crucial step in every field survey in herpetology. In countries where time and financial support are limited, the choice of the methods is critical. The methods used to sample snakes often lack objective criteria, and the traditional methods have apparently been more important when making the choice. Consequently researches using not-standardized methods are ...

For vegetation parameter inversion, the single baseline polarimetric SAR interferometry (POLinSAR) technique, such as the three-stage method and the ESPRIT algorithm, is limited by the observed data with the minimum ground to volume amplitude ration, which effects the estimation of the effective phase center for the vegetation canopy or the surface, and thus results in the underestimated vegeta...

State of the Problem Lidar remote sensing provides measurements of horizontal and vertical vegetation structure of ecosystems which will be critical for estimating global carbon storage and assessing ecosystem response to climate change and natural and anthropogenic disturbances. However, no consistent approach currently exists to derive the lidar based vegetation structure information required...

Earth's future carbon balance and regional carbon exchange dynamics are inextricably linked to plant photosynthesis. Spectral vegetation indices are widely used as proxies for vegetation greenness and to estimate state variables such as vegetation cover and leaf area index. However, the capacity of green leaves to take up carbon can change throughout the season. We quantify photosynthetic capac...

The pace of on-going climate change calls for reliable plant biodiversity scenarios. Traditional dynamic vegetation models use plant functional types that are summarized to such an extent that they become meaningless for biodiversity scenarios. Hybrid dynamic vegetation models of intermediate complexity (hybrid-DVMs) have recently been developed to address this issue. These models, at the cross...

The Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) is widely used for monitoring, analyzing, and mapping temporal and spatial distributions of physiological and biophysical characteristics of vegetation. It is well documented that the NDVI approaches saturation asymptotically under conditions of moderate-to-high aboveground biomass. While reflectance in the red region (rho(red)) exhibits a nearl...