Estimates of canopy height (H) and fractional canopy cover (FC) derived from lidar data collected during leaf-on and leaf-off conditions are compared with field measurements from 80 forested riparian buffer plots. The purpose is to determine if existing lidar data flown in leaf-off conditions for applications such as terrain mapping can effectively estimate forested riparian buffer H and FC wit...

to nadir-viewed vegetation reflectance data. Variability INTRODUCTION in tissue optical properties was wavelength-dependent. During the past several decades, the tools for vegetation For green foliage, the lowest variation was in the visible remote sensing have evolved significantly. Optical remote (VIS) spectral region and the highest in the near-infrared sensing has expanded from the use of p...

Hierarchical Bayesian models often capture distributions over a very large number of distinct atoms. The need for these models arises when organizing huge amount of unsupervised data, for instance, features extracted using deep convnets that can be exploited to organize abundant unlabeled images. Inference for hierarchical Bayesian models in such cases can be rather nontrivial, leading to appro...

Canopy-forming shrubs are reported to be increasing at sites around the circumpolar Arctic. Our results indicate expansion in canopy cover and height of willows on Herschel Island located at 70 degrees north on the western Arctic coast of the Yukon Territory. We examined historic photographs, repeated vegetation surveys, and conducted monitoring of long-term plots and found evidence of increase...

________________________________________________________________________________ Abstract Grazing levels and rotational schemes need to be tailored to each individual farm or pasture, and more studies are needed on the resilience of rangelands and on separating the effects of grazing and climate. The direct short-term impact of three rates of stocking (4, 8 and 16 Small Stock Units-SSU/ha) was ...

This study investigates the potential of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to measure and monitor structural properties of forests. Two remote sensing techniques, airborne laser scanning (ALS) and structure from motion (SfM) were tested to capture three-dimensional structural information from a small multi-rotor UAV platform. A case study is presented through the analysis of data collected from a...

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water erosion causes severe soil damage in northern forests of iran which is associated with different rut depths in skid trails. the aim of this study was to assess rutting and soil displacement on skid trails to mitigate water erosion. therefore the research was carried out in eight parcels of district no 3 of shafarood forest in the north of iran. in order to evaluate the amount of erosion i...

Canopies are common among autotrophs, increasing their access to light and thereby increasing competitive abilities. If viewed from above canopies may conceal objects beneath them creating a 'canopy effect'. Due to complexities in collecting 3-dimensional data, most ecosystem monitoring programmes reduce dimensionality when sampling, resorting to planar views. The resultant 'canopy effects' may...