Pan-tropical prediction of forest structure from the largest trees

Abstract

Large tropical trees form the interface between ground and airborne observations, offering a unique opportunity to capture forest properties remotely and to investigate their variations on broad scales. However, despite rapid development of metrics to characterize the forest canopy from remotely sensed data, a gap remains between aerial and field inventories. To close this gap, we propose a new pan-tropical model to predict plot-level forest structure properties and biomass from only the largest trees.