Back to Kew ....

Back at Kew, this time to try and scan some of the 'civilian' Planes and limes outside the Herbarium, and around the grounds. The weather didn't play ball on the whole, so we spent some time in the wonder that is the Palm House. Mainly this was so Florian could learn how to use the ZEB, but the resulting scans have proved rather elegant and striking. So here they are, variously produced by Florian, Phil and myself.

The outside on a rainy day - much warmer inside. Goose giving me the evil eye.

ZEB-REVO data collected by Florian over about 20 mins inside the Palm House (F. Hofhansl and P. Wilkes).

Section through the centre of the building scan (rendered by Justin Moat, Kew Gardens).

Another rather nice slice (rendered by Justin Moat, Kew Gardens).

Section through the centre of the scans, coloured by height (M Disney).

Historic London trees

We've been looking at working a little closer to home recently. Not that tropical forests, ancient woodlands and the like aren't interesting enough, just that in an old city like London, there are some pretty incredible trees. These are tied intimately to the history and development of the city itself. The availability of new data sources, in particular the UK's Environment Agency open sourcing their extensive airborne lidar over urban areas, has led to us thinking about how we can use this.

London has a *lot* of trees, many of them large and spectacular London Planes,  Platanus x hispanica. This is arguably THE iconic London tree, with its mottled bark, huge leaves and (sometimes problematic!) seed pods. They line so many streets, parks and avenues, providing shade, cooling and habitat for birds and insects. They can occasionally take a chunk out of unwary double decker buses too.

We're looking at using the EA lidar data, in conjunction with colleagues at fusiondatascience.com in Liverpool, and the GIS Unit at Kew Gardens, to identify and measure trees across London, and then use our ground-based lidar scanning to assess the size, volume and structure of a range of these. We're interested to see whether we can apply the same methods we do to tropical trees to urban/street trees in London, with their wide range of managed histories and shapes. We'd like to assess the amount of Carbon they store, their structure and how this relates to their environment.

As part of this work, we've started close to home, looking at trees in Camden, in collaboration with the Camden Council tree department. The first tree we've looked it is amazing - not a Plane, but an Ash. It's in the cemetery of St. Pancras Old Church, a very old (C11th) church tucked away behind the very modern and redeveloped Kings Cross. The Church history is interesting in itself, but there's an Ash tree in the yard with a very unusual back story. The railway being built in the mid C19th led to part of the cemetery needing to be excavated. A young Thomas Hardy was (supposedly) put in charge of moving displaced headstones, and placed them around the trunk of an Ash tree by the church. The tree and the headstones are now entwined, leaving a strange and rather haunting growing monument. The tree is struggling a bit, partly due to the unusual roots but also due to footfall around it. We are using our NERC NCEO-funded Riegl and ZEB-REVO lidars to scan the tree to build a detailed 3D model snapshot of it to help the Camden team plan their management in order to preserve this historic tree.

Scanning the "Hardy Tree". The railway line, and the modern world, is behind the wall.

A view of the scan data collected by Phil, of the whole church yard with the Hardy Tree to the front centre.

The tree, with the hedgerow surrounding it.

A closer view of the strange, leaf-like headstones around the trunk of the tree.

And this is how it looks 'for real'. Image: David Edgar.

Phil's path around the churchyard, carrying the ZEB-REVO handheld scanner. The Hardy Tree is the one at the front left of the Church with the loops around it.

Phil did a great job of capturing the tree with the ZEB and Riegl, and is currently processing the Riegl data - first example of a fly-through from those data is below. We will be extracting the 3D model of the tree and looking at the structure in detail, and then revisiting over the coming months to capture it leaf on, and then over time if we can.

Here's an additional animation that Phil produced, showing his walk through the church yard, alongside the ZEB data.

And here's the Sketchfab interactive model:

Hardy Tree (Camden, UK) and gravestones by kungphil on Sketchfab

The shortest day ....

Here we are on the winter solstice - I can feel the day(s) getting longer already. It's been a busy year for lasering stuff, and next year looks even more so. Which is of course a good thing. Meanwhile, Phil's been busy summarising some of the adventures we've had, from Ghana to Gabon, Manaus to Morpeth (well, Harwood), Wytham to ... well, woods far and wide. His post for the NCEO blog is an excellent summary of our activities. Phil has also written a blog guide to airborne lidar for the BES journal Methods in Ecology and Evolution, where Kim's Eucalypt biomass paper is still getting lots of attention - 58 citations so far, and a nice little feature on the BBC Science page after the 2016 BES meeting in Liverpool.

So... next year - Borneo, Brazil, deepest darkest Peru, California for some of these (*very* excited about that!)

A giant redwood: image Michael Nichols, from https://roadtrippers.com/stories/jaw-dropping-photographs-of-californias-giant-redwoods

 Closer to home, we'll be working on some London-based tree mapping and modelling. Including this rather striking Hardy Ash, so-called because the odd skirting of gravestones were added by a young Thomas Hardy during railway works in the 1860s (where he earned his living long before he became a writer). The tree is tucked away in one of London's many, many little hidden gems, St Pancras Old Church, apparently one of the oldest Christian places of worship in England (may be 7th century). And incidentally with several other literary connections, including featuring in A Tale of Two Cities, one of my all-time favourite books. Camden Council are interested in measuring the tree and getting a view on how to best preserve it. Which is where we come in for our first work of 2017. From the old to the new.

FACE time

Our latest trip was to the Amazon again, this time to the ZF2 forest site, north of Manaus, central Amazonia.

Hellooooo Amazonia!

Field station at the ZF2 research site.

The Brazilian government are funding an extremely ambitious new Free Air CO2 Enrichment (FACE) experiment at the site, to try and answer the question "What will the Amazon rainforest response be to elevated CO2 levels over the next century or so?" See the Science feature on the experiment from May 2016.

Model projections of change in the Amazon over the next century. From Lapola et al. (2009).

These FACE experiments are a well-established, if logistically challenging way to take a peek into the future and look at large-scale ecosystem response to climate. FACE experiments are an attempt to duplicate the kind of treatment/control replicate lab experiments we are all familiar with. But full scale! There have been a wide range of these projects over the last 20 years or so, in a range of ecosystems, but never in the Amazon. Until now.

Upward-looking panorama of the FACE ring tower and canopy.

AmazonFACE is establishing 8 30m diameter rings, each with a tower in the centres, which will have CO2 piped into the canopy, raising the ambient CO2 to around 600 ppm (50% or so above current normal levels) for the next 10-15 years. The rings span a range of forest conditions, and have paired plots fairly nearby which will be the controls. Within the rings, and at the wider site, the climate and wide range of soil, plant, biotic responses will be measured, as the rings are established and the CO2 is switched on (planned for start 2018).

We were very privileged to be invited by Prof. David Lapola and his AmazonFACE team to come and use our lidar to scan the FACE rings at the outset of the experiment, to try and characterise the plot biomass and structure. We also aim to establish a baseline of the canopy structure against which future changes can be compared, as well as to try and unpick the structural differences between the rings at the outset.

A single scan from our Riegl, centred on the middle of one of the AmazonFACE rings (colour is vertical height, from blue to green).

A close up of a single scan within the ring above, showing the tower at the centre. Some of our reflector targets can be seen in bright red to the right of the large tree in the centre (colour represents return intensity of the laser pulse, from blue to red).

Top view of scan taken using our ZEB-REVO mobile laser scanner, with the tower visible in the centre (colour represents vertical height, from blue to green).

After some amazing logistical and paperwork help from David and his team, particularly Bruno Takeshi who is the guy who does everything (including driving through and over and fallen trees!), Matheus and I spent a very busy few days scanning the FACE rings with our lidar. We had a great deal of help from Dr. Florian Hofhansl, the resident ecophysiology expert, and other station researchers. We collected 8 rings with our Riegl and I also managed to scan them with our GeoSLAM ZEB-REVO. Florian's overview of the experiment is really informative, with detailed maps and plans etc. Check it out.

Despite some minor travel hiccups (losing not one, but both our laptops, on different flights; we got them back, albeit one only on the way back out), the occasional unseasonal tropical downpour, fallen trees and getting savaged by some tiny horrors (me), the expedition has been a great success and I'm really excited about the results. It's also been great to establish some new research collaborations with the Brazilian AmazonFACE team and their colleagues from elsewhere. Huge thanks to the team and cNPQ, INPA and the colleagues, for bringing us out and organising the trip.

Cross section (few cm in depth) of the ZEB-REVO scan, showing some of the tree trunks.

Oblique slice through a Riegl scan.

Thanks all!

We were faster, but maybe not by much.

Mondah plots done!

2 weeks, 2 hectares, 484 scans, many billion points, several hundred trees including way more 40+ m beauties than I've seen in one place before, some ants in the pants, some blood & definitely sweat, but fortunately no tears. Got some additional 'bonus' data to collect in the time left over with the ZEB, some high res scans of single trees but we got what we came for. We've acquired an additional member of the team for a few days in Melina, a stagiare with ANPN, who has already done some great work manually verifying which tree is which in the lidar stem maps. We're very happy about that and hope she can carry on with us in Lopé (if she wants to!). An example of one of these maps is here.

An example stem map, from plot MNG-04, showing the NE-most 20 x 20m quadrant, with tree sections from the lidar labelled with their tree IDs from the tags. Good work by Melina.

And we really couldn't have done this without the huge help of Leandre, who has been amazing - guiding, carrying, organising, driving and generally being the oil in the wheels of progress. Thanks!

There's nothing like getting that last scan done, and getting the heck out of Dodge for a shower and a nice cup of tea ;-)

Mondah plot snaps

Andy has been working through the Mondah data from the first two GEM plots, and here are some examples of what they look like. First up is a transect through the MNG-03 plot, which covers 1 full row of 100m, and is about 20m deep. The plot shows the scanner locations on the 10m grid along the bottom (3 rows of them). The colours represent points coming from different scanning locations, with each colour corresponding to the colour of the scan location 'dot' - it's quite hard to see those for any other than the nearest ones on the black background, but you get the idea. For example, the purple points in the upper part of the tall tree in the centre come from scans to the far left and right in this case, showing how scan locations far from a given tree can often reveal the most detail at the top, due to being able to see through the surrounding crowns more easily.

Transect through MNG-03 showing the points from 3 rows of scan locations. There are 121 locations in each plot in total i.e. 11 rows of 11 locations, starting at 0, 0 and moving up to 100, 100 in 10m spacing. The point cloud here is drastically reduced (by factor of 1000) to allow easier manipulation.

 The image below shows a fill resolution example of a typical large tree with very grand buttressed roots, in the centre of the MNG-04 plot. In this case the colours represent the reflectance (returned energy) of the points, so the reflectance of points from the nearby broad trunk and roots is very high (near white), while the reflectance from the leaves and from points further away is much lower (orange through to dark red and black).

Reflectance image of small section of MNG-04 plot. This shows the full point cloud density.

Meanwhile, some more results from the ZEB-Revo scan are shown below. First, a height map of the whole plot, which shows the ZEB sees around 30m in some cases. So we can see the lower parts of the trees well, up to the crowns of the taller trees, but no detail in the upper part of the canopy. There are ~130M points in the 1ha cloud in total. Note that the heights aren't relative to the ground level but to the total height variation across the cloud. So the highest points (upper right) are still only 20-30m above the ground, but are on a raised area and so 30-40m above the lowest points. So the red parts here are largely a map of underlying topography. 

ZEB-Revo scan of MNG-04 plot, with the colour representing height, from 0 (blue) to around 35-40m (red).

Another view of the ZEB scan of the plot, from above this time.

View from above, looking down on the ZEB-Revo scan of the MNG-04 plot.

And a zoom in on one section in the diagonal gap towards the left of the plot. This gap may not be real - I think it may be a function of my scanning pattern going haywire during my walk of the plot. Staying on the grid is hard when you're struggling to walk, not fall down the slope or large holes, trip over logs and vines and hold the scanner at the same time!

Zoom in of small section of the ZEB scan of the MNG-04 plot.

 

Return to Gabon

So we're back in Gabon, returning after 3 years to scan Yadvinder's GEM plots at Mondah where we previously scanned. And then on to Lopé where we'll revisit 2 previously scanned AfriTRON plots, and then a few more new ones established by Simon for the ESA BIOMASS cal/val campaign. This will be the first time we can look at possible changes over 3 years, against a backdrop of the recent very large El Niño event.

Andy is leading the field campaign, over 6 or 7 weeks, with Matheus, myself, Ewan and Joanna coming in and out over the duration. We've had huge help from ANPN Gabon, via Kath Jeffrey, Lee White, David Lehmann and others in organising permits, kit and logistics. Without them it's safe to say this wouldn't be happening. And they've also organised great local help, Leandre and Hector in particular, who are really helping to make the operation much more efficient.

Day 1 and we had this visitor following us on the road!

No you can't have my lunch.

A 'typical' view of the second GEM plot.

Leandre carrying the Riegl out of the plot. A job for a younger man than me these days!

One of the giants we're here to scan, in the centre of our plot. Photos just don't do these trees justice - this one is 50+ m tall, with the enormous buttressed root system and a canopy that seems to be in the clouds.

One thing we're doing here is testing out our new Geoslam ZEB-Revo handheld scanner, to see what it can do. In particular we want to see how well it can capture the tree trunks and diameter, given its relatively short range, and how quickly we can do plots. First results are very encouraging. I scanned our 1h plot in about 80 minutes, generating 500G of data, which took ~6 hrs to process. But Andy and I were surprised at the level of detail and how well the tree trunks were captured. The snapshots here don't really do the detail justice, but this looks very good indeed. It opens up the possibility of us covering many ha at this level of detail, for trunk diameter and shape, to augment the more detailed Riegl data.

A very small slice through the 1ha ZEB scan of the plot.

I also scanned a single large tree in the corner of the plot, looping around it 3 times. The results from this are also very encouraging indeed. Here's a slice showing the tree with 2 slightly smaller (but still huge!) trees next to it. The white points are a second horizontal slice through the cloud, shown in plan view below.

Scan of single large tree (well, 3 really).

A slice through the trunk of the large tree, at about 4m above the ground, with the other two smaller trees next to it, and the rest of the point cloud in gray around them. The larger tree diameter is around 1m.

So, good progress and some interesting results so far and I'm really looking forward to seeing what we can get from the ZEB in combination with the Riegl. It's hard work doing the high density scanning in this landscape though! ;-)