What is it about?
The study provide a comprehensive evaluation of the most common indirect optical methods to estimate leaf area index in broadleaved forests, including canopy cover and hemispherical photography, plant canopy analyzer and AccuPAR ceptometers. Results were compared with direct data from littertraps and indicates that canopy photography is an effective and cheaper method to estimate leaf area index in forestry.
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Why is it important?
The study showed that cover photography, a method developed by Macfarlane et al., is a very promising technique to estimate leaf area index compared with hemispherical photography and other methods. The strenght of cover photography lies in its simple procedure, high spatial resolution at the zenith, which allows accurate detectioning of gap fraction between and within crowns, resulting in a lower sensitivit of cover photography to image acquisition (exposure, aperture, sky conditions) and processing than hemispherical photography.
Perspectives
As demonstrated in another study (Chianucci 2016, Silva Fennica), cover photography can provide robust and objective estimate of canopy cover, which would represent a key variable in forest inventory (many national inventory have already included it). The main limitation compared with hemispherical instrument, that cover photography require indipendent knowledge of leaf inclination angle, has recently disappearing as simple photographic methods (Ryu et al. 2010 AFM) allowed indipendent calculation of leaf inclination angle, while Pisek et al. (2013 AFM) have characterized leaf inclination for a wide number of broadleaved tree species.
Dr Francesco Chianucci
Forestry Research Centre, Italy
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Estimation of canopy properties in deciduous forests with digital hemispherical and cover photography, Agricultural and Forest Meteorology, January 2013, Elsevier,
DOI: 10.1016/j.agrformet.2012.09.002.
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