Intense hurricanes disturb many tropical forests, but the key mechanisms driving post-hurricane forest changes are not fully understood. In Puerto Rico, we used a replicated factorial experiment to determine the mechanisms of forest change associated with canopy openness and organic matter (debris) addition. Cascading effects from canopy openness accounted for most of the shifts in the forest b...

The paper describes the design and operation of a multi-angle spectrometer (MAS) for automatic measurement of near-field spectral reflectances of plant canopies at hourly intervals. A novel feature of the instrument is a rotating periscope connected to a spectrometer via a fiber optic cable. Canopy reflectances are calculated for multiple view azimuths, at a single zenith angle from measurement...

Plant growth correlates with net carbon gain on a whole plant basis. Over the last several decades, the driving factors shaping plant morphology and performance have become increasingly clear. This review seeks to explore the importance of these factors for grass performance. Briefly, these fall into factors influencing photosynthetic rates directly, competition between plants in a canopy, and ...

BACKGROUND Tropical rainforests are frequently limited by soil nutrient availability. However, the response of the metabolic phenotypic plasticity of trees to an increase of soil nutrient availabilities is poorly understood. We expected that increases in the ability of a nutrient that limits some plant processes should be detected by corresponding changes in plant metabolome profile related to ...

[1] Combining sap flux and eddy covariance measurements provides a means to study plant stomatal conductance and the relationship between transpiration and photosynthesis. We measured sap flux using Granier-type sensors in a northern hardwood-dominated old growth forest in Michigan, upscaled to canopy transpiration, and calculated canopy conductance. We also measured carbon and water fluxes wit...

Increased soybean seed cost in recent years has generated interest in reducing seeding rates to maintain consistent economic returns. However, low seeding rates result in reduced established plant stands with slower canopy development, and canopy development is touted as an important element of integrated weed management (IWM). IWM practices have become even more important to slow the developme...

Fungal symbioses affect the diversity, dynamics, and spatial patterns of trees in tropical forests. Their ecological importance is partly driven by their inherent patchiness. We used epifoliar fungi, a guild of common, benign, obligate, fungal symbionts of plants, as a model system to evaluate the relative importance of host phylogeny, host relative abundance, and microclimate on the three-dime...

Early water stress recognition is of great relevance in precision plant breeding and production. Hyperspectral imaging sensors can be a valuable tool for early stress detection with high spatio-temporal resolution. They gather large, high dimensional data cubes posing a significant challenge to data analysis. Classical supervised learning algorithms often fail in applied plant sciences due to t...