Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology
Characterization of forest functional types and their role in mediating ecosystem response to environmental change Terrestrial ecologists are now called upon to provide regional scale predictions of the delivery of key ecosystem services from complex forest environments that are increasingly subjected to multiple agents of global environmental change. This necessitates the identification of the spatial …
From late August through September 2011, the Pagami Creek fire burned approximately 38,000 hectares of boreal forest in and around the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in Minnesota, USA. The fire exhibited a wide range of behaviors across this ecologically diverse landscape where members of our lab, along with US Forest Service collaborators, had been …
Measurement of ecosystem metabolism across climatic and vegetation gradients in California for the 2013-2014 NASA AVIRIS/MASTER airborne campaign. The HyspIRI project makes use of flux towers at several of its sites to assess the airborne hyperspectral data. Flux towers measure the exchange of carbon, water and energy between the ecosystem and the atmosphere by collecting …
Remotely Quantifying Aspen Genetic Variation Biodiversity is important to ecosystem functioning. Diversity at all levels – of soil biota, plant and animal species and their behavior, and the genetics of those species – provides ecosystems with the capacity to respond to changes in the environment. We are interested in characterizing multiple levels of biodiversity at …
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 …
Relationships among remotely sensed forest canopy traits and insect community composition Globally, insects are the largest and most diverse group of animals, representing an overwhelming percentage of Earth’s biodiversity. In addition, insects and their associated pathogens constitute one of the single largest disturbance threats to forest ecosystems in North America. However, landscape-scale drivers of insect …
Hyperspectral spectroscopy provides the opportunity to estimate key ecosystem traits beyond those derived from traditional remote sensing techniques due to the increased spectral resolution. The HyspIRI project attempts to make measurements of ecosystem metabolism, and we hope to characterize variations in metabolism across a landscape due to climate and species composition. We are using imaging …