New Zealand Journal of Ecology (1998) 22(1): 71-85 ©New Zealand Ecological Society Availability of suitably-sized support is a major factor limiting liane access to the canopy because lianes are not self-supporting (Putz and Holbrook, 1991). In the Knysna Forest, South Africa, aspects of forest architecture which affect support availability, rather than abiotic factors such as light levels and ...

Regulating the shade provided by overstory trees is important in the management of shaded-perennial agroforestry systems. In order to compare the merits of commonly used light-assessment techniques that could potentially be useful to farmers and extensionists and to quantify the extent of shading in multistrata agroforestry systems, understory photosynthetically active radiation (PAR) was measu...

The geometrical structure of plant canopies has many implications for plant functioning, microclimatic conditions, and plant-pathogen/herbivore interactions. Plant geometry can be described at several scales. At the finest scale, canopy structure includes the shape, size, location, and orientation of each organ in the canopy. This data set reports the three-dimensional (3-D) geometry of a set o...

Height models based on high-altitude aerial images provide a low-cost means of generating detailed 3D models of the forest canopy. In this study, the performance of these height models in the detection of individual trees was evaluated in a commercially managed boreal forest. Airborne digital stereo imagery (DSI) was captured from a flight altitude of 5 km with a ground sample distance of 50 cm...

Individual tree crowns may be delineated from airborne laser scanning (ALS) data by segmentation of surface models or by 3D analysis. Segmentation of surface models benefits from using a priori knowledge about the proportions of tree crowns, which has not yet been utilized for 3D analysis to any great extent. In this study, an existing surface segmentation method was used as a basis for a new t...

Several decades of research have shown that canopy gaps drive tree renewal processes in the temperate deciduous forest biome. In the literature, canopy gaps are usually defined as canopy openings that are created by partial or total tree death of one or more canopy trees. In this study, we investigate linkages between tree damage mechanisms and the formation or not of new canopy gaps in norther...

Several radiative techniques have been developed for inverse estimation of the leaf area indes (LAI) using optical data measured below the canopy (e.g. hemispherical photography) or above the canopy (remote sensing). In the inversion, a model of the three-dimensional distribution of leaves in the canopy is used to define the required relation between LAI and canopy transmittance and reflectance...

A grass-fire cycle in Australian tropical savannas has been postulated as driving the regional decline of the obligate-seeding conifer Callitris intratropica and other fire-sensitive components of the regional flora and fauna, due to proliferation of flammable native grasses. We tested the hypothesis that a high-biomass invasive savanna grass drives a positive feedback process where intense fir...