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Publications

NIBIOs employees contribute to several hundred scientific articles and research reports every year. You can browse or search in our collection which contains references and links to these publications as well as other research and dissemination activities. The collection is continously updated with new and historical material.

2013

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Abstract

We provide a demonstration of the new tomographic profiling (TP) technique, here applied to forestry for the first time. The portable ground-based synthetic aperture radar (GB-SAR) system was used to capture profiles of the vertical polarimetric backscattering patterns through a 7 m tall stand of Norway spruce trees. The TP scheme collects data as for normal SAR imaging, but with the antennae aligned in the along-track direction. Adaptive post-processing meant that each TP scan simultaneously captured along-track image transects over the incidence angle range 0°–60°. An important feature of the derived image products is that incidence angle is constant at every point within an image. The measured HH–VV height backscatter profiles were very similar, whilst the cross-/co-polarization ratio showed very little variation with height through the stand. Backscattering profiles showed closest agreement with the branch biomass distribution through the canopy, rather than with trunk or branch + trunk biomasses. Equivalent interferometric tree heights were estimated from the centre of mass of the backscatter-height distribution, which displayed increasing height with increasing incidence angle. There was no significant vertical separation between the cross- and co-polarization returns.

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Abstract

Recent studies from mountainous areas of small spatial extent (<2,500 km2) suggest that fine-grained thermal variability over tens or hundreds of metres exceeds much of the climate warming expected for the coming decades. Such variability in temperature provides buffering to mitigate climate-change impacts. Is this local spatial buffering restricted to topographically complex terrains? To answer this, we here study fine-grained thermal variability across a 2,500-km wide latitudinal gradient in Northern Europe encompassing a large array of topographic complexities. We first combined plant community data, Ellenberg temperature indicator values, locally measured temperatures (LmT), and globally interpolated temperatures (GiT) in a modelling framework to infer biologically relevant temperature conditions from plant assemblages within <1,000-m2 units (community-inferred temperatures: CiT). We then assessed: (1) CiT range (thermal variability) within 1-km2 units; (2) the relationship between CiT range and topographically- and geographically-derived predictors at 1-km resolution; and (3) whether spatial turnover in CiT is greater than spatial turnover in GiT within 100-km2 units. Ellenberg temperature indicator values in combination with plant assemblages explained 46-72% of variation in LmT and 92-96% of variation in GiT during the growing season (June, July, August). Growing-season CiT range within 1-km2 units peaked at 60-65°N and increased with terrain roughness, averaging 1.97°C (SD = 0.84°C) and 2.68°C (SD = 1.26°C) within the flattest and roughest units, respectively. Complex interactions between topography-related variables and latitude explained 35% of variation in growing-season CiT range when accounting for sampling effort and residual spatial autocorrelation. Spatial turnover in growing-season CiT within 100-km2 units was, on average, 1.8 times greater (0.32°C km-1) than spatial turnover in growing-season GiT (0.18°C km-1). We conclude that thermal variability within 1-km2 units strongly increases local spatial buffering of future climate warming across Northern Europe, even in the flattest terrains.