Tracking forest dynamics across spatial, temporal and ecological scales using airborne LiDAR

About the talk

Characterising the processes that shape forest dynamics across broad spatial and temporal scales remains a major challenge in ecology. Satellite remote sensing has played an important role in helping to fill this knowledge gap, providing us with a global picture of how forests have been changing over the past several decades. However, relating changes in forest cover observed from space to the growth, mortality and recruitment of individual trees that ecologists typically measure in the field is anything but straightforward. In this talk I will explore a number of ways in which airborne LiDAR can act as a go-between satellites and ground data when it comes to tracking forest responses to disturbance across spatial, temporal and ecological scales.