We have all seen trees swaying in the wind, but did you know that tree motion can teach us about ecology? Researchers have monitored tree motion for different purposes, from assessing wind damage risk to monitoring drought stress. Our new paper brings all this data together to study the differences between types of trees and test whether previous results generalize across a range of data sets. We computed a set of descriptive features from the…
Author: coomeslab
Treetops protect forest life from global warming
The forest canopy mitigates peak summer temperatures for the understorey. When that shade disappears, the organisms living there suffer. The cooling leaf canopy protects forest organisms from extreme temperatures and has a significant influence on their adaptation to global warming, according to this study which was published in the journal Science. The climate in the…
Standardizing Ecosystem Morphological Traits from 3D Information Sources
3D-imaging technologies provide measurements of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems’ structure, key for biodiversity studies. However, the practical use of these observations globally faces practical challenges. First, available 3D data are geographically biased, with significant gaps in the tropics. Second, no data source provides, by itself, global coverage at a suitable temporal recurrence. Thus, global monitoring…
Protecting biodiversity and economic returns in resource‐rich tropical forests
In pursuit of socioeconomic development, many countries are expanding oil and mineral extraction into tropical forests. These activities seed access to remote, biologically rich areas, thereby endangering global biodiversity. Here we demonstrate that conservation solutions that effectively balance the protection of biodiversity and economic revenues are possible in biologically valuable regions. Using spatial data on…
Dynamics of a human‐modified tropical peat swamp forest revealed by repeat lidar surveys
Tropical peat swamp forests (PSFs) are globally important carbon stores under threat. In Southeast Asia, 35% of peatlands had been drained and converted to plantations by 2010, and much of the remaining forest had been logged, contributing significantly to global carbon emissions. Yet, tropical forests have the capacity to regain biomass quickly and forests on…
Partial river flow recovery with forest age is rare in the decades following establishment
River flow responses to forestation at annual time scales The landscapes of the future might look very different to those today, and many have argued that increasing tree cover is essential to mitigate the worst effects of climate change. But forests affect many naturalprocesses, including water availability. We systematically reviewed the literature to determine how…
A Research Agenda for Microclimate Ecology in Human-Modified Tropical Forests
Logging and habitat fragmentation impact tropical forest ecosystems in numerous ways, perhaps the most striking of which is by altering the temperature, humidity, and light environment of the forest—its microclimate. Because local-scale microclimatic conditions directly influence the physiology, demography and behavior of most species, many of the impacts of land-use intensification on the biodiversity and…
Imaging spectroscopy reveals the effects of topography and logging on the leaf chemistry of tropical forest canopy trees
In this study we show that logged tropical forests have reduced leaf nutrient concentrations compared with old-growth forests and this becomes more pronounced as forests recover in stature. Our findings suggest rock-derived nutrients, such as phosphorus, in short supply in tropical forests on old soils, are depleted by as much as 30% by logging. This…
Capturing juvenile tree dynamics from count data using Approximate Bayesian Computation
The juvenile life stage is a crucial determinant of forest dynamics and a first indicator of changes to species’ ranges under climate change. However, paucity of detailed re‐measurement data of seedlings, saplings and small trees means that their demography is not well understood at large scales, and rarely represented in forest models in detail. In…
3D Segmentation of Trees Through a Flexible Multiclass Graph Cut Algorithm
Developing a robust algorithm for automatic individual tree crown (ITC) detection from airborne laser scanning (ALS) data sets is important for tracking the responses of trees to anthropogenic change. Such approaches allow the size, growth, and mortality of individual trees to be measured, enabling forest carbon stocks and dynamics to be tracked and understood. Many…
