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Abstract
The forest canopy is the interface between the land and the atmosphere, fixing atmospheric carbon into biomass and releasing oxygen and water. The arrangement of individual trees, differences in species morphology, the availability of light and soil nutrients, and many other factors determine canopy structure. Overviews of approaches for basic measurements of canopy structure are presented including height (maximum stem height), the fraction of ground overlain by foliage (coverage), and the leaf area per unit ground area (leaf area index, LAI). These measures are important for characterizing estimates of ecosystem productivity and development, as well as for interpreting and validating landscape- to regional-scale estimates of vegetation attributes derived from remote sensing data. The approaches outlined are not exhaustive, but rather identify a range of robust ground- and remote sensing-based methods that capture a suite of metrics useful to the goals of the North American Carbon program: to provide robust, ground-based estimates of C uptake, storage, and flux that can be used for validation and scaling.
Citation
Smith, Marie-Louise; Anderson, Jeanne; Fladeland, Matthew. 2008. Forest canopy structural properties Chapter 14. In: Hoover, Coeli M., ed. Field measurements for forest carbon monitoring: A landscape-scale approach. New York, NY: Springer Science + Business Media: 179-196.
