Vegetation structure, including forest canopy height, is an important input variable to fire behavior modeling systems for simulating wildfire behavior. As such, forest canopy height is one of a nationwide suite of products generated by the LANDFIRE program. In the past, LANDFIRE has relied on a combination of field observations and Landsat imagery to develop existing vegetation structure produ...

Positive feedbacks in drivers of degradation can cause threshold responses in natural ecosystems. Though threshold responses have received much attention in studies of aquatic ecosystems, they have been neglected in terrestrial systems, such as forests, where the long time-scales required for monitoring have impeded research. In this study we explored the role of positive feedbacks in a tempera...

Ecologists and foresters are becoming increasingly aware of the importance of spatial information in ecosystem analysis and resource management. An across-scale analysis of forest structure was conducted to characterize the spatial characteristics of a 2 ha spruce-®r forest located inside Changbaishan Natural Reserve (CNR), PR China. The study was designed to develop an approach for assessment ...

The concept of canopy spectral invariants expresses the observation that simple algebraic combinations of leaf and canopy spectral reflectance become wavelength independent and determine two canopy structure specific variables – the recollision and escape probabilities. These variables specify an accurate relationship between the spectral response of a vegetation canopy to incident solar radiat...

Little is known about in-canopy processes that may alter forest–atmosphere exchanges of trace gases and aerosols. To improve our understanding of in-canopy mixing, we use large-eddy simulation to study the effect of scalar source/sink distributions on scalar concentration moments, fluxes, and correlation coefficients within and above an ideal forest canopy. Scalars are emitted from: (1) the gro...

The geologic history of closed-canopy forests is of great interest to paleoecologists and paleoclimatologists alike. Closed canopies have pronounced effects on local, continental and global rainfall and temperature patterns. Although evidence for canopy closure is difficult to reconstruct from the fossil record, the characteristic isotope gradients of the “canopy effect” could be preserved in l...

BACKGROUND Recent studies have shown that fragmentation is an increasing threat to global forests, which has major impacts on biodiversity and the important ecosystem services provided by forested landscapes. Several tools have been developed to evaluate global patterns of fragmentation, which have potential applications for REDD+. We study how canopy height and above ground biomass (AGB) chang...

Japanese black bears often break branches when climbing trees and feeding on fruit in canopies, thereby creating small canopy gaps. However, the role of black bear-created canopy gaps has not been evaluated in the context of multiple forest dynamics. Our hypothesis was that small canopy gaps created by black bears improve light conditions, which facilitates fruiting of adult fleshy-fruited plan...

Intermittent coherent structures can be responsible for a large fraction of the exchange between a forest canopy and the atmosphere. Quantifying their contribution to momentum and heat fluxes is necessary to interpret measurements of trace gases and aerosols within and above forest canopies. The primary objective of the Community Atmosphere-Biosphere Interactions Experiment (CABINEX) field camp...

Stable isotopes provide insight into ecosystem carbon cycling, plant physiological processes, atmospheric boundary-layer dynamics, and are useful for the integration of processes over multiple scales. Of particular interest is the carbon isotope content (dC) of nocturnal ecosystem-respired CO2 (dR). Recent advances in technology have made it possible to continuously examine the variation in dR ...