This study estimates CO2 sequestration by forests in Japan using Land Remote Sensing Satellite (Landsat) Operational Land Imager (OLI) and the Advanced Land Observing Satellite (ALOS) Phased Array L-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (PALSAR) remote sensing data for the in-depth retrieval of forest growth stages (tree age). Landsat imagery was used to develop a detailed forest cover map, while the P...

Midday depressions in stomatal conductance (g(s) ) and photosynthesis are common in plants. The aim of this study was to understand the hydraulic determinants of midday g(s) , the coordination between leaf and stem hydraulics and whether regulation of midday g(s) differed between deciduous and evergreen broadleaf tree species in a subtropical cloud forest of Southwest (SW) China. We investigat...

Several methods exist for extracting plant phenological information from time series of satellite data. However, there have been only a few successful attempts to temporarily match satellite observations (Land Surface Phenology or LSP) with ground based phenological observations (Ground Phenology or GP). The classical pixel to point matching problem along with the temporal and spatial resolutio...

Due to that the vegetation has been influenced by human activity for a long period, such as logging, grazing and trampling, giant pandas’ habitat has been fragmented gradually, which has threatened the survival of the giant panda. Therefore, it would be an essential issue to inspect the spatial pattern of the giant panda’s habitat and analyze the factors which drive these habitat changes. The a...

An accurate estimation of the leaf area index (LAI) by satellite remote sensing is essential for studying the spatial variation of ecosystem structure. The goal of this study was to estimate the spatial variation of LAI over a forested catchment in a mountainous landscape (ca. 60 km2) in central Japan. We used a simple model to estimate LAI using spectral reflectance by adapting the Monsi-Saeki...

Separating the components of soil respiration and understanding the roles of abiotic factors at a temporal scale among different forest types are critical issues in forest ecosystem carbon cycling. This study quantified the proportions of autotrophic (RA) and heterotrophic (RH) in total soil (RT) respiration using trenching and litter removal. Field studies were conducted in two typical subtrop...

Understanding forest carbon cycling responses to atmospheric N deposition is critical to evaluating ecosystem N dynamics. The natural abundance of N (dN) has been suggested as an efficient and non-invasive tool to monitor N pools and fluxes. In this study, three successional forests in southern China were treated with four levels of N addition. In each treatment, we measured rates of soil N min...

The effects of long-term reforestation on soil microbial communities and biomass are poorly understood. This study was conducted on two coniferous plantations: Cunninghamia konishii Hayata, planted 40 years ago (CONIF-40), and Calocedrus formosana (Florin) Florin, planted 80 years ago (CONIF-80). An adjacent natural broadleaf forest (BROAD-Nat) was used as a control. We determined microbial bio...

We assessed the biomass production, biomass allocation patterns, height growth, and root airspace of seventeen wetland plant taxa, including two potentially invasive species, grown under high nutrient conditions and subjected to four hydrologic regimes: constant drawdown, cyclic flooding and drawdown, cyclic flooding and drought, and constant flooding for the duration of the experiment ( 10 wee...

Forest texture is an intrinsic characteristic and an important visual feature of a forest ecological system. Full utilization of forest texture will be a great help in increasing the accuracy of forest classification based on remote sensed data. Taking Shangri-La as a study area, forest classification has been based on the texture. The results show that: (1) From the texture abundance, texture ...