3D canopy imaging...

Last week, the lab took a trip to Harvard forest to image the canopy (or lack thereof) before leaf out using LiDar, thanks to a collaboration with Crystal Schaaf and Francesco Peri from UMASS-Boston. Crystal and Francesco and their team of engineers developed an incredibly fast means to make a 3D scan from laser reflectance, and have deployed this technology in forests all over the world. 

Our aim is to characterize the forest with and without leaves using LiDar to be able to accurately account for the mass/volume of standing livewood, deadwood, and during the growing season, leaves. These values will then be related to measured real-time fluxes of carbon via eddy covariance and fluorescence, as well as allow for the scaling of leaf-level measurements of photosynthesis and respiration (in leaves and stems).