—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...

Ecological communities are structured in response to spatial and temporal variation of numerous factors, including edaphic conditions, biotic interactions, climatic patterns and disturbance regimes. Widespread anthropogenic factors such as timber harvesting can create long-lasting impacts, obscuring the relationship between community structure and environmental conditions. Minimally impacted sy...

Leaf photosynthesis is known to acclimate to the actual irradiance received by the different layers of a canopy. This acclimation is usually described in terms of changes in leaf structure, and in photosynthetic capacity. Photosynthetic capacity is likely to be affected by mesophyll conductance to CO(2) which has seldom been assessed in tree species, and whose plasticity in response to local ir...

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...

Canopy shading is a widely used viticultural strategy for mitigating early grape berry ripening caused by global warming. In this study, we covered half of the canopy with black shade cloth from pea-size stage to harvest. fruit zone, treatment (ST) reduced daily average solar radiation about 74.6 % compared untreated control (UC), and significantly temperature. ST leaves were found have lower n...

Given the time scale based on duration of exposure to global warming, natural climate-gradient studies and experimental manipulations have detected long-term (decades centuries) short-term (years decades) ecological responses warming. Combination these two complementary approaches within a single study may enable prediction likely processes To understand how warming affects plant–herbivore inte...

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...

—Prescribed burning and mechanical thinning are used to manage fuels within many western North American forest ecosystems, but few studies have examined the relative impacts of these treatments on forest wildlife. We sampled northern flying squirrels (Glaucomys sabrinus) and microhabitat variables in burned, thinned and control stands of mixed-conifer forest of the southern Sierra Nevada at the...