Our researcher Samuli Junttila’s dissertation Utilizing multispectral lidar in the detection of declined trees has been published and popularized as a music video.
The main objective of Junttila’s thesis was to investigate the capabilities of multispectral terrestrial lidar in the detection and assessment of tree decline caused by different stressors. This was done by investigating the estimation of a remotely detectable indicator of tree decline, leaf water content (LWC).
The World’s forests are facing novel stress due to climate change. Pest insects and pathogens are shifting towards new latitudes and heat stress is resulting in increased tree mortality and more frequent forest fires globally. Uncertainty in estimating the magnitude of climate change induced forest and tree decline requires new methods for unbiased estimation of tree decline.
The dissertation contributes both to the development of an objective and automatable method for detecting and measuring tree decline in the field, and to the understanding of the relationship between LWC and tree decline with implications to remote sensing.
Read more: http://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-951-651-644-1
See the Video here: http://bit.ly/idanproffa