Complete landscape characterization of tree density and its application to environmental gradient analysis
Jonathan
Asher
Greenberg, NASA Ames Research Center, jgreenberg@arc.nasa.gov
(Presenting)
Solomon
Z.
Dobrowski, University of California, Davis, szdobrowski@ucdavis.edu
Vern
C.
Vanderbilt, NASA Ames Research Center, vvanderbilt@mail.arc.nasa.gov
We present a novel approach for performing environmental gradient analysis to address the question: is potential tree density in the eastern Lake Tahoe Basin, NV limited by water, temperature or photosynthetically active radiation (PAR)? To address this question we perform a multidimensional environmental gradient analysis based on a fusion of continuous tree density estimates derived from hyperspatial remote sensing imagery with continuous estimates of available water, annual mean temperature and annual PAR. Our analysis draws from a dataset of over 3 million individual trees and over 300,000 30m “plots”. We discuss how fusing accurate and ecologically relevant remote sensing outputs with continuous microclimate surfaces can provide a powerful tool for addressing major questions of tree distributions and life history parameters, and can provide parameterization of ecosystem models.