Journal article
A new method for measuring stand sapwood area in forests
D Jaskierniak, R Benyon, G Kuczera, A Robinson
Ecohydrology | WILEY | Published : 2015
DOI: 10.1002/eco.1520
Abstract
We introduce a novel methodology for measuring stand sapwood area (SA), which provides a useful indicator of evapotranspiration from forest stands. The method is demonstrated in a 73-year-old Eucalyptus regnans forest comprising 784 stems over a 5ha area. We used photos of stump cross-sections to differentiate sapwood from heartwood and found 90% of stump segments to have a visible transition boundary. The digital images were corrected for lens distortion and scaled to an actual cross-sectional area, with resulting stump perimeters corresponding well with field-measured perimeters traced using string (root-mean-square error=4cm, R2=0.99). Calculated SA and basal area (BA) at stump height wer..
View full abstractRelated Projects (2)
Grants
Awarded by Australian Research Council
Funding Acknowledgements
This project was funded by Melbourne Water and an Australian Research Council Linkage grant (LP110200194). We thank Claire Ren for her efforts in delineating some of the stumps and assistance in the field. We are also grateful for the valuable field assistance provided by VicForests when collecting data on the log landings of an active coupe. We also thank the anonymous reviewers for their advice on improving the quality of this paper. Finally, we have no conflict of interest to declares.