Category Archives: Uncategorized

When an intense tropical storm passes over a forest it leaves destruction in its wake. Post-damage surveys often show that the tall trees are disproportionately killed in these events. However, it is very difficult to attribute the cause of death of a large tree after the event. A tree may be snapped and lying onContinue reading “Do tall trees have a higher risk of wind damage?”

Time-series of canopy greenness derived from satellite imagery can beanalysed alongside environmental factors, species composition andmanagement regimes, to better understand forest resilience to drought.In Spain, forests are on average greening despite drying trends. Thisresilience manifests in the short-term with native species activatingdrought tolerance and avoidance mechanisms observable from space (i.e.losing and gaining little greenness likeContinue reading “Resilience of Spanish forests to recent droughts and climate change”

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 monitoringContinue reading “Standardizing Ecosystem Morphological Traits from 3D Information Sources”

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 onContinue reading “Protecting biodiversity and economic returns in resource‐rich tropical forests”

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 onContinue reading “Dynamics of a human‐modified tropical peat swamp forest revealed by repeat lidar surveys”

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 andContinue reading “A Research Agenda for Microclimate Ecology in Human-Modified Tropical Forests”

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. InContinue reading “Capturing juvenile tree dynamics from count data using Approximate Bayesian Computation”

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. ManyContinue reading “3D Segmentation of Trees Through a Flexible Multiclass Graph Cut Algorithm”

Here we report the recent discovery of the world’s tallest tropical tree (Shorea faguetiana), possibly the world’s tallest angiosperm (flowering plant), located in the rainforests of Sabah, Malaysian Borneo. In addition, we provide a novel three-dimensional exploration of the dimensions of this remarkable tree and use these data to speculate on what drives the limitsContinue reading “The world’s tallest tropical tree in three dimensions”

Most studies exploring habitat fragmentation effect on biodiversity were conducted at the local or regional level. These studies generally ignored background information (e.g. history, drivers and dynamics) of forest fragmentation which is critical for biodiversity conservation at large scales (e.g. national scale). Hence, these studies provided little practical implications for forest management in fragmented landscapes.Continue reading “Forest gain doesn’t stop forest fragmentation in China”