Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Forest Sciences
Influence of wind speed on canopy Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) measurements for forest ecosystem
Published: 2024-08-13
Subjects: Forest Sciences
Wind speed can affect the observation of canopy vegetation index. When the wind blows, plants will swing, and the spatial structure of the canopy will change. This change may affect the vegetation index measurements. Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) from satellite remote sensing was chosen as the index to explore the influence of wind on canopy measurements for forest ecosystems. Our [...]
A Range of Management Strategies for Planted Pine Systems Yields Net Climate Benefits
Published: 2024-06-29
Subjects: Forest Sciences
Managed forests, including plantation systems, play a vital and often underappreciated role in contributing to the global carbon sink and mitigating climate change, and determining the most effective mitigation strategies requires accounting methods that accurately assess the climate effects of forests. We use a dynamic life cycle assessment methodology to compare the climate effects of [...]
Spatial Patterns of Urban Heat Islands and Green Space Cooling Effects in the Urban Microclimate of Karachi
Published: 2024-05-22
Subjects: Climate, Environmental Sciences, Forest Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sustainability
With rapid urbanization and the increasing threats of climate change, metropolitan cities like Karachi, Pakistan, are encountering greater challenges due to the Urban Heat Island (UHI) phenomenon. Understanding the cooling potential of urban green spaces (UGS) is crucial for mitigating heat stress and enhancing urban resilience. This study aims to analyze the thermal dynamics and cooling efficacy [...]
The Potential for Fuel Reduction to Offset Climate Warming Impacts on Wildfire Intensity in California
Published: 2024-02-21
Subjects: Climate, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Forest Management, Forest Sciences, Meteorology, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Other Statistics and Probability, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Probability, Statistical Methodology, Statistical Models, Statistics and Probability
Increasing fuel aridity due to climate warming has and will continue to increase wildfire danger in California. In addition to reducing global greenhouse gas emissions, one of the primary proposals for counteracting this increase in wildfire danger is a widespread expansion of hazardous fuel reductions. Here, we quantify the potential for fuel reduction to reduce wildfire intensity using [...]
Can land-use and land-cover change explain reduced resilience in forests?
Published: 2023-10-24
Subjects: Forest Sciences
Generating signals of reduced resilience in ecosystems is crucial for conservation and management endeavors. However, the practical implications of such systems are still limited due to the lack of high-frequency data and uncertainties associated with predicting complex systems such as ecosystems. This study aims to investigate the potential of time series analysis of remote sensing data in [...]
Understanding Europe’s forest harvesting regimes
Published: 2023-09-01
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Forest Management, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Nature and Society Relations
The functioning and structure of most European forests are actively shaped by intensive human use. Harvesting of wood is one of the key processes of forest management, making it a crucial element to include in any large-scale analysis of forest ecosystems. Yet, our understanding of how forests are harvested across Europe is limited, as the true harvest regimes – a realisation of decisions made by [...]
Electric Circuit Theory as a method for monitoring tree water deficit at different scales
Published: 2023-07-12
Subjects: Forest Biology, Forest Sciences, Other Forestry and Forest Sciences
Climate change is expected to alter precipitation patterns, making droughts more frequent in some areas, which will expose trees to more severe water deficits which could result in the catastrophic collapse of their water transport system and, eventually, mortality. To inform forest management and tree species suitability to increase forest resilience requires a robust method for understanding [...]
A Climate Counternarrative: Dubious Carbon Accounting is Making a Canopy Problem Look Like an Energy Problem (for Consent and Profit)
Published: 2023-05-13
Subjects: Agriculture, Climate, Forest Sciences, Soil Science
The modern rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide is man-made but driven by land stewardship changes rather than industrial activities like fossil fuels. Carbon cycle research fails to adequately convey surface-level interactions like plants soaking up carbon dioxide emitted near them. Clear-cutting a forest, for instance, produces a large plume of biogenic carbon dioxide that wind can carry away, [...]
Towards robust interdisciplinary modeling of global human-environmental dynamics
Published: 2023-02-20
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Studies, Forest Sciences, Geography, Life Sciences, Nature and Society Relations
Real-world environmental problems are typically vast, urgent, and complex. Confronted with such problems, we are often tempted to act fast by pulling together little bits and pieces from different fields and simply adding these to pre-existing models and frameworks. Seldom, though, do we pause long enough to look whether and for how long those larger structures we build can support reliable [...]
Drivers of fire regimes in the Brazilian Amazon from 2011-2020
Published: 2022-10-18
Subjects: Environmental Studies, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Over the last decade, carbon emissions due to forest degradation in the Brazilian Amazon, linked mainly to logging and wildfires, became larger than carbon emissions due to deforestation. Climatic and ecological processes affect the landscape’s flammability, while socio-economic processes influence the use of fire for deforestation and agricultural land management. However, a comprehensive [...]
A mid-20th century estimate of global vegetation carbon stocks based on inventory statistics
Published: 2022-03-28
Subjects: Environmental Studies, Forest Sciences, Geography
Biomass carbon stocks (BCS) play a vital role in the climate system, but benchmarked estimates prior to the late 20th century remain scarce. Here, by making use of an early global forest resource assessment and harmonizing information on land use and carbon densities, we establish a global BCS account for the year 1950. Our best-guess BCS estimate is 450.7 PgC (median of all modulations: 518.3 [...]
How to consider the effects of time of day, beam strength, and snow cover in ICESat-2 based estimation of boreal forest biomass?
Published: 2022-01-10
Subjects: Forest Management, Forest Sciences
Spaceborne lidar sensors have potential to improve the accuracy of forest above-ground biomass (AGB) estimates by providing direct measurements of 3D structure of forests over large spatial scales. The ICESat-2 (Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite 2), launched in 2018, provides a good coverage of the boreal forest zone and has been previously shown to provide good estimates of forest canopy [...]
Filtering ground noise from LiDAR returns produces inferior models of forest aboveground biomass in heterogenous landscapes
Published: 2021-12-14
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Forest Sciences, Research Methods in Life Sciences
Airborne LiDAR has become an essential data source for large-scale, high-resolution modeling of forest aboveground biomass and carbon stocks, enabling predictions with much higher resolution and accuracy than can be achieved using optical imagery alone. Ground noise filtering – that is, excluding returns from LiDAR point clouds based on simple height thresholds – is a common practice meant to [...]
rassta: Raster-Based Spatial Stratification Algorithms
Published: 2021-11-17
Subjects: Agriculture, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences
Spatial stratification of landscapes allows for the development of efficient sampling surveys, the inclusion of domain knowledge in data-driven modeling frameworks, and the production of information relating the spatial variability of response phenomena to that of landscape processes. This work presents the rassta package as a collection of algorithms dedicated to the spatial stratification of [...]
Airborne laser scanning proxies of canopy light transmission in forests
Published: 2021-10-29
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biogeochemistry, Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Plant Sciences, Software Engineering, Statistics and Probability
Reliable estimates of canopy light transmission are critical to understanding the structure and function of vegetation communities but are difficult and costly to attain by traditional field inventory methods. Airborne laser scanning (ALS) data uniquely provide multi-angular vertically resolved representation of canopy geometry across large geographic areas. While previous studies have proposed [...]