Forestry Applications of DART Model

A special issue of Forests (ISSN 1999-4907). This special issue belongs to the section "Forest Inventory, Modeling and Remote Sensing".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 December 2018) | Viewed by 11018

Special Issue Editors

University of Toulouse, Center for the Study of the Biosphere from Space (CESBIO; CNRS, CNES, IRD, Paul Sabatier University), 18 Avenue Edouard Belin, 31401 Toulouse, France
Interests: VIS / TIR radiative transfer modeling; optical remote sensing (imaging spectroradiometers, LiDAR) and radiative budget for forests, agriculture and cities.
Remote Sensing Research Group, Department of Geography, Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, University of Bonn, Meckenheimer Allee 166, 53115 Bonn, Germany
Interests: leaf and canopy imaging spectroscopy of terrestrial vegetation; forward and inverse radiative transfer modelling of plant leaves and canopies; interpretation of multi-scale (drone/air-/space-borne) earth observations (machine learning); impact of globally changing climate on plant physiology, stress and functional diversity
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
TETIS Lab., IRSTEA, F-3400 Montpellier, France
Interests: remote sensing of vegetation; biodiversity mapping; vegetation biophysical properties; imaging spectroscopy; tropical ecosystems; physical modeling; leaf traits
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, 8800 Greenbelt Rd, Greenbelt, MD 20771, USA
Interests: radiative transfer modeling; LiDAR; imaging spectroscopy; multisensor system; UAV; chlorophyll fluorescence; energy balance

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Scientific studies and operational monitoring of forest ecosystems increasingly rely on satellite, airborne and in situ proximal remote sensing observations, including innovative technologies of imaging spectroscopy and laser scanning (LiDAR). These non-invasive techniques provide information about spatial and temporal distribution of key forest biochemical and biophysical variables, such as contents of chemical foliage compounds and canopy architecture, which in turn improves our understanding of complex forest ecological and physiological processes. Yet, the inherent structural complexity of forests requires to scale leaf level information up to canopy or even ecosystem and biome level, which complicates interpretation of remote sensing data. Physically-based radiative transfer models are efficient tools to bridge this gap, provided that they meet a number of requirements and offer functionalities assuring acceptable models’ accuracy and performance. One of these requirements is an appropriate three dimensional (3D) geometrical and spatial description of sun, sensor, landscape and atmosphere features, for simulating accurate remote sensing acquisition and 3D radiative budget. The Discrete Anisotropic Radiative Transfer (DART) model fulfills this requirement, which explains its increasing use in forestry applications.

This Special Issue of Forests will overview the state-of-the-art use of DART in forestry research and applications. It will demonstrate the importance of physical 3D radiative transfer models for interpretation of remote sensing data, and will help to identify current gaps and future requirements for these models. Prospective authors are encouraged to document and share details of their work with DART in forest environments.

Dr. Jean-Philippe Gastellu-Etchegorry
Dr. Zbynek Malenovsky
Dr. Jean-Baptiste Feret
Dr. Tiangang Yin
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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Keywords

  • DART
  • forestry
  • remote sensing
  • radiative transfer modeling
  • forest canopy architecture

Published Papers (2 papers)

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Research

19 pages, 21206 KiB  
Article
3-D Reconstruction of an Urban Landscape to Assess the Influence of Vegetation in the Radiative Budget
by Maria Angela Dissegna, Tiangang Yin, Shanshan Wei, Dan Richards and Adrienne Grêt-Regamey
Forests 2019, 10(8), 700; https://doi.org/10.3390/f10080700 - 19 Aug 2019
Cited by 25 | Viewed by 4898
Abstract
Increased urbanization and climate change have resulted in the intensification of the urban heat island (UHI) effect, particularly in tropical cities. One of the main causes of UHI is the man-made urban surfaces influencing the radiation budget by absorbing, reflecting, and emitting radiation [...] Read more.
Increased urbanization and climate change have resulted in the intensification of the urban heat island (UHI) effect, particularly in tropical cities. One of the main causes of UHI is the man-made urban surfaces influencing the radiation budget by absorbing, reflecting, and emitting radiation at various wavelengths. The radiative budget of a city is directly influenced by the urban geometry, surface materials, direct solar radiation and incident angle, and atmospheric diffuse radiation. Vegetation cover, in contrast, can decrease UHI by intercepting radiation and through the process of photosynthesis. Better understanding the effect of urban vegetation on the radiative budget can thus contribute towards the mitigation of the UHI effect and ultimately the development of climate resilient urban spaces. To analyze the contribution of vegetation to the radiative budget of a city, a detailed simulation of the complex interaction between the built environment and the vegetation is required. This study proposes an approach for analyzing the 3-D structure of both vegetation and built environment to quantify the contribution of vegetation to the radiative budget of an urban landscape. In a first step, a detailed 3-D model of Singapore including buildings and vegetation was reconstructed using a combination of free and commercial Earth Observation data. Then, the 3-D Discrete Anisotropic Radiative Transfer (DART) model was repurposed to estimate the radiation absorbed by the urban surfaces accounting for the presence of vegetation cover with changing Leaf Area Density (LAD) conditions. The presence of trees in the scene accounted for a significant reduction of the absorbed radiation by buildings and ground. For example, in the case of a residential low-building neighborhood, although having low tree cover, the reduction of the absorbed radiation by buildings and ground was up to 15.5% for a LAD =1. The field validation shows good agreement (R2 = 0.9633, RMSE = 10.8830 and Bias = −1.3826) between the DART-simulated shortwave exitance and upwelling shortwave measurements obtained from a net radiometer mounted on a local flux tower in the urban area of Singapore, over the studied period. Our approach can be used for neighborhood-scale analysis, at any desired location of a city, to allow test scenarios with varying surface materials and vegetation properties. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Forestry Applications of DART Model)
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35 pages, 47113 KiB  
Article
Influence of 3D Spruce Tree Representation on Accuracy of Airborne and Satellite Forest Reflectance Simulated in DART
by Růžena Janoutová, Lucie Homolová, Zbyněk Malenovský, Jan Hanuš, Nicolas Lauret and Jean-Philippe Gastellu-Etchegorry
Forests 2019, 10(3), 292; https://doi.org/10.3390/f10030292 - 26 Mar 2019
Cited by 28 | Viewed by 5158
Abstract
Advances in high-performance computer resources and exploitation of high-density terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) data allow for reconstruction of close-to-reality 3D forest scenes for use in canopy radiative transfer models. Consequently, our main objectives were (i) to reconstruct 3D representation of Norway spruce ( [...] Read more.
Advances in high-performance computer resources and exploitation of high-density terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) data allow for reconstruction of close-to-reality 3D forest scenes for use in canopy radiative transfer models. Consequently, our main objectives were (i) to reconstruct 3D representation of Norway spruce (Picea abies) trees by deriving distribution of woody and foliage elements from TLS and field structure data and (ii) to use the reconstructed 3D spruce representations for evaluation of the effects of canopy structure on forest reflectance simulated in the Discrete Anisotropic Radiative Transfer (DART) model. Data for this study were combined from two spruce research sites located in the mountainous areas of the Czech Republic. The canopy structure effects on simulated top-of-canopy reflectance were evaluated for four scenarios (10 × 10 m scenes with 10 trees), ranging from geometrically simple to highly detailed architectures. First scenario A used predefined simple tree crown shapes filled with a turbid medium with simplified trunks and branches. Other three scenarios used the reconstructed 3D spruce representations with B detailed needle shoots transformed into turbid medium, C with simplified shoots retained as facets, and D with detailed needle shoots retained as facets D. For the first time, we demonstrated the capability of the DART model to simulate reflectance of complex coniferous forest scenes up to the level of a single needle (scenario D). Simulated bidirectional reflectance factors extracted for each scenario were compared with actual airborne hyperspectral and space-borne Sentinel-2 MSI reflectance data. Scenario A yielded the largest differences from the remote sensing observations, mainly in the visible and NIR regions, whereas scenarios B, C, and D produced similar results revealing a good agreement with the remote sensing data. When judging the computational requirements for reflectance simulations in DART, scenario B can be considered as most operational spruce forest representation, because the transformation of 3D shoots in turbid medium reduces considerably the simulation time and hardware requirements. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Forestry Applications of DART Model)
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