Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology
EcoSIS Spectral Library Spectroscopy allows indirect measurement of vegetation physical and chemical properties, assessment of plant functional types and biodiversity, and quantification of biosphere-atmosphere gas and energy exchange. While extensive spectral libraries exist, diverse collection procedures, storage formats, and limited metadata have prevented or complicated their use in comparative studies, meta-analyses, and global-scale ecosystem models. …
Characterizing biodiversity and understanding its consequences on ecosystem functioning are important challenges in the context of environmental change. Biodiversity encapsulates the condition and variations in a suite of compositional, structural, and functional attributes. Current methodologies for estimating biodiversity are expensive and time consuming and necessitates establishing less expensive methodology that can comprehensively characterize heterogeneity within …
Scaling of inter- and intra-annual variation in foliar traits derived from imaging spectroscopy A common assumption in remote sensing is that a constituent map made from imagery in one year is representative of constituents in subsequent years. This assumption has been partially supported using ground collected data, but it has never been formally tested using …
All organisms interact via chemical signals. As such, chemical ecology plays a central role in explaining the interactions among organisms and their environment and how these interactions affect ecosystem functioning. Traditionally, standard chemical measurements are time consuming, expensive, and require destructive sampling. The use of reflectance spectroscopy to characterize foliar chemistry is based on the …