Dataset Information

Linking ice accretion and crown structure: towards a model of the effect of freezing rain on tree canopies.

ABSTRACT:

Background and aims

Despite a longstanding interest in variation in tree species vulnerability to ice storm damage, quantitative analyses of the influence of crown structure on within-crown variation in ice accretion are rare. In particular, the effect of prior interception by higher branches on lower branch accumulation remains unstudied. The aim of this study was to test the hypothesis that intra-crown ice accretion can be predicted by a measure of the degree of sheltering by neighbouring branches.

Methods

Freezing rain was artificially applied to Acer platanoides L., and in situ branch-ice thickness was measured directly and from LiDAR point clouds. Two models of freezing rain interception were developed: 'IceCube', which uses point clouds to relate ice accretion to a voxel-based index (sheltering factor; SF) of the sheltering effect of branch elements above a measurement point; and 'IceTree', a simulation model for in silico evaluation of the interception pattern of freezing rain in virtual tree crowns.

Key results

Intra-crown radial ice accretion varied strongly, declining from the tips to the bases of branches and from the top to the base of the crown. SF for branches varied strongly within the crown, and differences among branches were consistent for a range of model parameters. Intra-crown variation in ice accretion on branches was related to SF (R(2) = 0·46), with in silico results from IceTree supporting empirical relationships from IceCube.

Conclusions

Empirical results and simulations confirmed a key role for crown architecture in determining intra-crown patterns of ice accretion. As suspected, the concentration of freezing rain droplets is attenuated by passage through the upper crown, and thus higher branches accumulate more ice than lower branches. This is the first step in developing a model that can provide a quantitative basis for investigating intra-crown and inter-specific variation in freezing rain damage.

SUBMITTER: Nock CA

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4904176 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Publications

Linking ice accretion and crown structure: towards a model of the effect of freezing rain on tree canopies.

Nock Charles A CA Lecigne Bastien B Taugourdeau Olivier O Greene David F DF Dauzat Jean J Delagrange Sylvain S Messier Christian C

Annals of botany 20160423 7

<h4>Background and aims</h4>Despite a longstanding interest in variation in tree species vulnerability to ice storm damage, quantitative analyses of the influence of crown structure on within-crown variation in ice accretion are rare. In particular, the effect of prior interception by higher branches on lower branch accumulation remains unstudied. The aim of this study was to test the hypothesis that intra-crown ice accretion can be predicted by a measure of the degree of sheltering by neighbour ...[more]

PMID: 27107412

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Project description:An international data science challenge, called National Ecological Observatory Network-National Institute of Standards and Technology data science evaluation, was set up in autumn 2017 with the goal to improve the use of remote sensing data in ecological applications. The competition was divided into three tasks: (1) individual tree crown (ITC) delineation, for identifying the location and size of individual trees; (2) alignment between field surveyed trees and ITCs delineated on remote sensing data; and (3) tree species classification. In this paper, the methods and results of team Fondazione Edmund Mach (FEM) are presented. The ITC delineation (Task 1 of the challenge) was done using a region growing method applied to a near-infrared band of the hyperspectral images. The optimization of the parameters of the delineation algorithm was done in a supervised way on the basis of the Jaccard score using the training set provided by the organizers. The alignment (Task 2) between the delineated ITCs and the field surveyed trees was done using the Euclidean distance among the position, the height, and the crown radius of the ITCs and the field surveyed trees. The classification (Task 3) was performed using a support vector machine classifier applied to a selection of the hyperspectral bands and the canopy height model. The selection of the bands was done using the sequential forward floating selection method and the Jeffries Matusita distance. The results of the three tasks were very promising: team FEM ranked first in the data science competition in Task 1 and 2, and second in Task 3. The Jaccard score of the delineated crowns was 0.3402, and the results showed that the proposed approach delineated both small and large crowns. The alignment was correctly done for all the test samples. The classification results were good (overall accuracy of 88.1%, kappa accuracy of 75.7%, and mean class accuracy of 61.5%), although the accuracy was biased toward the most represented species.

Dataset Information

Linking ice accretion and crown structure: towards a model of the effect of freezing rain on tree canopies.

Background and aims

Methods

Key results

Conclusions

Publications

Linking ice accretion and crown structure: towards a model of the effect of freezing rain on tree canopies.

Similar Datasets

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