Quantifying forest canopy traits Imaging spectroscopy versus field survey》.pdf

Remote Sensing of Environment 158 (2015) 15–27 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Remote Sensing of Environment journal h omepage: /locate/rse Quantifying forest canopy traits: Imaging spectroscopy versus field survey Gregory P. Asner ⁎, Roberta E. Martin, Christopher B. Anderson, David E. Knapp Department of Global Ecology, Carnegie Institution for Science, 260 Panama Street, Stanford, CA 94305, USA a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t Article history: Spatial and temporal information on plant functional traits are lacking in ecology, which limits our understanding Received 16 June 2014 of how plant communities and ecosystems are changing. This problem is acute in remote tropical regions, where Received in revised form 13 November 2014 information on plant functional traits is difficult to ascertain. We used Carnegie Airborne Observatory visible-to- Accepted 14 November 2014 shortwave infrared (VSWIR) imaging spectroscopy with light detection and ranging (LiDAR) to assess the foliar Available online 5 December 2014 traits of Amazonian and Andean tropical forest canopies. We calibrated and validated the retrieval of 15 canopy Keywords: foliar chemicals and leaf mass per area (LMA) across a network of 79 1-hectare field plots using a new VSWIR- Amazon basin LiDAR fusion approach designed to accommodate the enormous scale mismatch between field and remote sens- Canopy chemistry