Abstract
The development of terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) has opened new avenues in the study of trees. Although TLS provides valuable information on structural elements, fine-scale analysis, e.g., at the annual shoots (AS) scale, is currently not possible. We present a new model to segment and classify AS from tree skeletons into a finite set of “physiological ages” (i.e., state of specialization and physiological age (PA)). When testing the model against perfect data, 90% of AS year and 99% of AS physiological ages were correctly extracted. AS length-estimated errors varied between 0.39 cm and 2.57 cm depending on the PA. When applying the model to tree reconstructions using real-life simulated TLS data, 50% of the AS and 77% of the total tree length are reconstructed. Using an architectural automaton to deal with non-reconstructed short axes, errors associated with AS number and length were reduced to 5% and 12%, respectively. Finally, the model was applied to real trees and was consistent with previous findings obtained from manual measurements in a similar context. This new method could be used for determining tree phenotype or for analyzing tree architecture.
Highlights
Trees are modular organisms that exhibit organ specialization in order to fulfill multiple functions [1]
In this study, the annual shoots (AS) leaf area (LA) positively correlates with the AS length (Kendall τ = 0.746) while both leaf area density (LAD) and the leaf-to-shoot ratio (L:S) correlates negatively to AS length (τ = −0.592 and τ = −0.809, respectively) and follow a negative exponential trend (Figure 8 [2,3]). These results show that, as expected, the morphological and functional variables correlate with the AS length and, that achieving PA partitioning based on AS length distribution would enable us to retrieve physiological ages with different functional attributes
We developed a model that enables, for the first time, the segmentation of annual shoots (AS) from tree skeletons obtained using terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) data
Summary
Trees are modular organisms that exhibit organ specialization in order to fulfill multiple functions [1] Among these functions, the fulfillment of space exploitation (i.e., light interception) and space exploration requires the production of different types of vegetative axes, some being specialized for space exploration—long axes with a strong investment in woody structure and supporting many ramifications—and some for space exploitation— short axes with a strong investment in leaves, usually poorly or not branched [1,2,3,4,5]. The recent development of terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) holds great potential for overcoming this limitation as 3D data of tree structures at a very high spatial resolution can be quickly acquired
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