Amazonian landscapes and the bias in field studies of forest structure and biomass.

ABSTRACT: Tropical forests convert more atmospheric carbon into biomass each year than any terrestrial ecosystem on Earth, underscoring the importance of accurate tropical forest structure and biomass maps for the understanding and management of the global carbon cycle. Ecologists have long used field inventory plots as the main tool for understanding forest structure and biomass at landscape-to-regional scales, under the implicit assumption that these plots accurately represent their surrounding landscape. However, no study has used continuous, high-spatial-resolution data to test whether field plots meet this assumption in tropical forests. Using airborne LiDAR (light detection and ranging) acquired over three regions in Peru, we assessed how representative a typical set of field plots are relativ

SUBMITTER: Marvin DC 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4260573 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature