Location
Hill Aerospace Museum, Conference Room
Start Date
5-6-2014 3:48 PM
Description
Land managers, ecologists, and global change biologists need to accurately describe net primary production (NPP) of a landscape. Their ability to accurately and precisely detect annual change in plant biomass determines how to manage a landscape, accurately describe treatment effects from an experiment, or understand how carbon is being stored in that ecosystem. Current practices or methods are hard to scale either down from LIDAR or NDVI, or scale up from allometric volumes and destructive plant biomass harvesting. Our study uses close-range photogrammetry (CRP) to measure shrub volume by creating three-dimensional models. We use this method that was developed to quantify eroding hill slopes to more accurately and precisely measure shrub volume. We found that CRP shrub volumes are 4-20% of the allometric volume measurements, but both are highly correlated with measured plant biomass (allometry R2 =0.9933; CRP R2 =0.9997). These results provide a novel way to accurately and precisely monitor experimental plants without altering the current treatments by harvesting plant material using standard photographic equipment and software.
Pictures are Worth more than a Thousand Grams
Hill Aerospace Museum, Conference Room
Land managers, ecologists, and global change biologists need to accurately describe net primary production (NPP) of a landscape. Their ability to accurately and precisely detect annual change in plant biomass determines how to manage a landscape, accurately describe treatment effects from an experiment, or understand how carbon is being stored in that ecosystem. Current practices or methods are hard to scale either down from LIDAR or NDVI, or scale up from allometric volumes and destructive plant biomass harvesting. Our study uses close-range photogrammetry (CRP) to measure shrub volume by creating three-dimensional models. We use this method that was developed to quantify eroding hill slopes to more accurately and precisely measure shrub volume. We found that CRP shrub volumes are 4-20% of the allometric volume measurements, but both are highly correlated with measured plant biomass (allometry R2 =0.9933; CRP R2 =0.9997). These results provide a novel way to accurately and precisely monitor experimental plants without altering the current treatments by harvesting plant material using standard photographic equipment and software.