TY - JOUR
T1 - Quantifying mortality of tropical rain forest trees using high-spatial-resolution satellite data
AU - Clark, David B.
AU - Castro, Carlomagno Soto
AU - Alvarado, Luis Diego Alfaro
AU - Read, Jane M.
PY - 2004/1
Y1 - 2004/1
N2 - Assessment of forest responses to climate change is severely hampered by the limited information on tree death on short temporal and broad spatial scales, particularly in tropical forests. We used 1-m resolution panchromatic IKONOS and 0.7-m resolution QuickBird satellite data, acquired in 2000 and 2002, respectively, to evaluate tree death rates at the La Selva Biological Station in old-growth Tropical Wet Forest in Costa Rica, Central America. Using a calibration factor derived from ground inspection of tree deaths predicted from the images, we calculated a landscape-scale annual exponential death rate of 2.8%. This corresponds closely to data for all canopy-level trees in 18 forest inventory plots, each of 0.5 ha, for a mostly-overlapping 2-year period (2.8% per year). This study shows that high-spatial-resolution satellite data can now be used to measure old-growth tropical rain forest tree death rates, suggesting many new avenues for tropical forest ecology and global change research.
AB - Assessment of forest responses to climate change is severely hampered by the limited information on tree death on short temporal and broad spatial scales, particularly in tropical forests. We used 1-m resolution panchromatic IKONOS and 0.7-m resolution QuickBird satellite data, acquired in 2000 and 2002, respectively, to evaluate tree death rates at the La Selva Biological Station in old-growth Tropical Wet Forest in Costa Rica, Central America. Using a calibration factor derived from ground inspection of tree deaths predicted from the images, we calculated a landscape-scale annual exponential death rate of 2.8%. This corresponds closely to data for all canopy-level trees in 18 forest inventory plots, each of 0.5 ha, for a mostly-overlapping 2-year period (2.8% per year). This study shows that high-spatial-resolution satellite data can now be used to measure old-growth tropical rain forest tree death rates, suggesting many new avenues for tropical forest ecology and global change research.
KW - Costa Rica
KW - IKONOS
KW - La Selva Biological Station
KW - QuickBird
KW - Remote sensing
KW - Tree mortality rates
KW - Tropical rain forest
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=0742302380&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=0742302380&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1046/j.1461-0248.2003.00547.x
DO - 10.1046/j.1461-0248.2003.00547.x
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:0742302380
SN - 1461-023X
VL - 7
SP - 52
EP - 59
JO - Ecology Letters
JF - Ecology Letters
IS - 1
ER -