Euronews!

The Reuters piece has been slightly extended and re-edited with some different material from me, and some additional animations (not from me) resulting in the following:
http://www.euronews.com/2015/01/26/laser-scanning-trees/
The piece makes a few different points, mainly about the methods, but also discusses the Brazil work a little more.

Short Reuters interview

The short interview I did for Reuters Technology is up. It showcases the recent Australia work in Kim's MEE paper but also the initial flythrough from Caixuana.


http://www.reuters.com/video/2015/01/14/3d-laser-mapping-weighs-trees?videoId=361763887&videoChannel=6&channelName=Technology

ESA BIOMASS mission science meeting

This week at ESA's Earth Observation HQ (ESRIN) in Frascati, scientists with an interest in measuring forest C stocks and biomass more generally, are meeting to discuss the science aims and challenges of the ESA BIOMASS Earth Explorer mission. BIOMASS will make routine observations of P band (70 cm) radar, which is related to the amount of standing C in forests. 

ESA's BIOMASS mission: a slightly dodgy artist's impression (from ESA)

The meeting is to start thrashing out what exactly what we need to do to make the most of BIOMASS observations. In particular, there is a big focus on calibration and validation activities - BIOMASS will rely on calibration of the radar signal against other measures of C stocks, particularly from ground plots, but also airborne lidar. These will all rely in some way or another on allometry, and this is where the TLS comes in. There is a huge need for accurate estimates of C stocks from plot data, hence my invite to come and show what we can do and how this might be a very effective way of augmenting plot data and linking to airborne lidar for cal/val. This is an interesting and varied meeting, as it brings together a wide range of including forest and conservation experts, ecologists, lidar, radar and other EO specialists, modellers and so on. Good to see Ralph Dubayah here, long-tome lidar champion and PI of the NASA GEDI mission to be launched on the ISS around the same time as BIOMASS (2019), and which will make highly-complementary measurements. 

New results from Caxiuana

We're gradually going through the data from the Brazil trip, learning as we go. But the results so far are definitely very positive - all the hard work in laying out the targets systematically seems to have paid off in that the registration is better than we could have hoped for really. Andy's put in a great effort to get the drought plot done, and from what we can see there are very few areas where the registration of one scan to the next is anything other than excellent. Good news! The first fly through is done - again, props Andy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4-xBCQ291M&feature=youtu.be

A 100 x 5 m slice (40 M points) through the drought plot showing the beautiful detail of the canopy profile.

Here's a zoom in of the slice.

Here's a second slice through the plot - again, coloured by height (note the slice through the runnels on the bottom).

Finally, here's a zoom in of the above slice, with the rainfall runnels more visible.

Kim's paper out in MEE

Kim's paper on testing the TLS-derived biomass estimates against destructive harvests was published today in Methods in Ecology and Evolution. For a local PDF go here. Wageningen University and UCL did press releases on it. It's a good paper - Kim should be proud of it. It's the real hard evidence that the TLS plus QSM really can do volume ok, particularly once you consider the uncertainty in the QSM reconstruction methods more systematically, which is what we've been able to contribute. A key result in my mind is that it really shows how the uncertainty in the TLS-derived values are independent of tree size, unlike the allometry-derived values which tend to grow with tree size, mainly due to the smaller and smaller numbers of larger trees. Now to do the same across the tropical trees we have, and we'll hopefully start seeing how this affects things across the tropics!

TLS point cloud and reconstructed model, from Calders et al. (2014).

And here's a really nice animation of the Brisbane field plot from WU.

Trees in their eyes

Here's a shot of our Wytham tree, scanned, reconstructed and looped, projected onto a screen and then reflected in my eye from close-up. Got it? Lovely.

Shipping out

So we've reached our last day in Brazil, for now. We took the overnight boat from Brevez to Belem, which was an adventure in itself. 14 hours up river, with decks of colourful hammocks slung from every available piece of metal. We had small cabins - comfortable enough despite the tiny bunks and freezing a/c. Better than a hammock though!

Hammocks on the boat from Brevez to Belem.

I watched the sun rise over the river and we made our way off the docks to the hotel, with all our cargo still in tact. Minus the target poles, which we left behind for Alex to use to mark the plots in the forest. We managed to lose/break only about 5 or 6 poles out of 70-odd, which is pretty good going and a testament to Lucy's organisation with the pole layout. That's been a very valuable experience in terms of the registration - we now know how to do this much more effectively than we did before, and how more poles isn't necessarily better. Systematic is the way to go.

Sunrise heading towards to Belem.

We've had a couple of days in Belem, doing some sightseeing - the old colonial parts of the city remain, slightly run down, but with some spectacular architecture including the old cathedral, the Theatre of Peace and the fort. We lucked out with the Theatre - after taking a tour we were given free tickets for a Richard Strauss concert that night. It was really beautiful, and a very strange contrast after getting off the boat from the remote jungle that morning, to sitting in a 19th C concert hall listening to Viennese waltzes.


Fresco on the ceiling of the Theatre de Paz, Belem.

Cathedral in Belem.

Our last thing to do was go to the Institute of Geoscience at UFPA, the University Federal do Para, to see Prof. Lola Da Costa, the driving force behind the Caxiuana experiment. Lola has been working at Caxiuana for more than 20 years, and is the reason the experiment exists, and has survived various funding threats over the years. We showed Lola some of early results from the scanning, and he was excited about the prospects of what we can do with data to elucidate links between structure and physiology. We're all extremely grateful for Lola's help in organising our trip and I'm sure we'll be back.

Pro. Da Costa with Lucy, outside the best fried fish place in town.

Lola took us for dinner on our last night at a small fish place - only thing on the menu was fried fish and prawns, and it was amazing. Some great local Para musicians were playing, (many) beers were drunk and it was a fitting finale for our trip to Brazil. Andy and I chatted about the tasks ahead for processing the lidar data - we worked out that we think we can do the registration much more efficiently, which would be hugely time-saving. Our idea needs needs testing but I don't know why we didn't think of it before - better late than never though eh?