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...

Cancer is a disease driven by evolutionary selection on somatic genetic and epigenetic alterations. Here, we propose Canopy, a method for inferring the evolutionary phylogeny of a tumor using both somatic copy number alterations and single-nucleotide alterations from one or more samples derived from a single patient. Canopy is applied to bulk sequencing datasets of both longitudinal and spatial...

We present an application of 3D canopy modelling for assessing the structural accuracy of complex 3D structural models of Sitka spruce. Such models can be used to simulate canopy reflectance at the landscape-scale with a minimum number of assumptions. Typically, however, the underlying canopy structural models require a large number of parameters, many of which are hard to measure and so must b...

[1] The emerging interdisciplinary approaches of ecohydrology and hydropedology are sensitive to variation in soil-surface energy inputs, which are primarily modified by topography and woody plant canopies. Yet a synthesis of the interactive effects of these two modification types is lacking. We systematically estimated near-ground surface solar radiation inputs as modified by key attributes of...

A three-day workshop was organized at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences, Brussels, Belguim, 6-8 July 2005, with financial support from the European Science Foundation, United Nations Environment Programme and Global Canopy Programme <>. The workshop focused on the international project IBISCA (Investigating ...

The following study reports on the preliminary results of a novel processing technique for characterizing the three-dimensional distribution of airborne and ground-based LiDAR data for conifer and mixed deciduous forest plots. The frequency of laser returns within 1m x 1m x 1m cubes (voxels) and the plotting of percentile distributions within each column (e.g. 1m x 1m x 25m, x, y, z) may benefi...

Elevation gradients provide opportunities to explore environmental controls on forest structure and functioning. We used airborne imaging spectroscopy and lidar (light detection and ranging) to quantify changes in threedimensional forest structure and canopy functional traits in twenty 25 ha landscapes distributed along a 3300 m elevation gradient from lowland Amazonia to treeline in the Peruvi...

Phytophthora root rot (PRR) infects the roots of avocado trees, resulting in reduced uptake of water and nutrients, canopy decline, defoliation, and, eventually, tree mortality. Typically, the severity of PRR disease (proportion of canopy decline) is assessed by visually comparing the canopy health of infected trees to a standardised set of photographs and a corresponding disease rating. Althou...