Speaker : Dr. Pierre Couteron (UMR AMAP, Montpellier)

Venue : Jawaharlal Nehru Conference Hall, French Institute of Pondicherry, 11, Saint Louis Street, Pondicherry - 605 001.

Abstract

The influence of the morphology of individual plants onto broad scale vegetation properties has only received scant attention from either empirical or theoretical standpoints. We here advocate that : (i) meaningful measures of vegetation scaling attributes can be derived through frequency analyses (Fourier or wavelet spectra) of remote-sensing imagery of high spatial resolution (either aerial- or satellite-based) ; (ii) dynamical models of plant-plant interactions or of 3D-forest structure dynamics can help understand how the morphology of individual plants translate into emergent vegetation properties and to which extent some key model parameters can be retrieved from vegetation images (model inversion). This perspective will be applied to the case of tropical evergreen closed-canopy forests for which Fourier-based measures of canopy texture proved to be correlated to stand parameter variables, such as tree density, mean quadratic tree diameter and above-ground biomass. Forest stand modelling based on tree allometries and subsequent image simulations from a radiative transfer model allow understanding the determinants and limitations of such correlations, which could translate into methods for broad-scale monitoring of forests and carbon stocks.