Tree age estimation for the tropics: A test from the southern Appalachians

Abstract

The lack of annual growth rings in the majority of tropical tree species greatly limits our understanding of the long-term dynamics of tropical forests. To address this problem, several methods have been developed to estimate the age of tropical trees from diameter growth data. These past approaches, however, suffer from two major flaws: (1) they assume a deterministic age-size relationship for a tree species, and (2) they have not been verified with independently derived age data. In this paper, I present a new approach that uses diameter growth rates, independent of tree size, that are stratified by crown class to estimate the age of individual trees. Past approaches have assumed that when..