Abstract
The alarming increase in the magnitude and spatiotemporal patterns of changes in composition, structure and function of forest ecosystems during recent years calls for enhanced cross-border mitigation and adaption measures, which strongly entail intensified research to understand the underlying processes in the ecosystems as well as their dynamics. Remote sensing data and methods are nowadays the main complementary sources of synoptic, up-to-date and objective information to support field observations in forest ecology. In particular, analysis of three-dimensional (3D) remote sensing data is regarded as an appropriate complement, since they are hypothesized to resemble the 3D character of most forest attributes. Following their use in various small-scale forest structural analyses over the past two decades, these sources of data are now on their way to be integrated in novel applications in fields like citizen science, environmental impact assessment, forest fire analysis, and biodiversity assessment in remote areas. These and a number of other novel applications provide valuable material for the Forests special issue “3D Remote Sensing Applications in Forest Ecology: Composition, Structure and Function”, which shows the promising future of these technologies and improves our understanding of the potentials and challenges of 3D remote sensing in practical forest ecology worldwide.
Highlights
The research on understanding the underlying ecological processes of forest ecosystems has been amongst the main interests in natural sciences for centuries
A high number of text books written by forest ecologists on forest ecology are available, in which basic concepts and detailed topics are elaborated either as a whole [1,2,3] or by considering specific global biome- and ecosystem-specific characteristics [4,5,6]
By defining a framework to answer most ecological questions one may, note the structure of forest landscapes in general, which is inherently complex and three-dimensional (3D). This is mainly raised by the presence and dynamics of vegetative elements that harmonize with factors like topography, wildlife and climatic variables
Summary
The research on understanding the underlying ecological processes of forest ecosystems has been amongst the main interests in natural sciences for centuries. Here we deliberately focused on 3D sources of data due to (1) their higher semantic association with most concepts and attributes in forest ecology and (2) the existing dearth of collective research summary (e.g., reviews, proceedings and journal special issues) on their applications in forest ecology.
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