Hemispherical Photography in Forest Science Theory, Methods, Applications

About this book

This book presents practical information about hemispherical photography from the perspectives of field data acquisition, image processing and information retrieval methods. This is a photography technique to estimate solar radiation and characterize plant canopy geometry using photographs taken looking upward through an extreme wide-angle lens (a so-called fish-eye lens).

Hemispherical Photography in Forest Science is organized into three sections. The first section describes what hemispherical photography is and what the fundamental elements are of forest structure and light interactions within the forest canopy. The second section provides practical information about the equipment, procedures and tools for procuring, processing and analyzing hemispherical photographs. Armed with this information, the third section describes several applications of hemispherical photographs to forestry and natural resource assessment. The book concludes with a discussion about modelling tools and future directions of this rapidly growing field. There is currently no information source on the market that has this comprehensive range of topics combined in a single book. The book will appeal to academics, graduate students, natural resource professionals and researchers alike.

Contents

Preface
Contributor biographer data
Chapter 1. Introduction
Chapter 2. Solar radiation in forests: theory for hemispherical photography
Chapter 3. Measurement of forest structure with hemispherical photography
Chapter 4. Acquiring hemispherical photographs in forest environments: from planning to archiving photographs
Chapter 5. Image analysis of hemispherical photographs, algorithms and calculations
Chapter 6. View angle-dependent clumping indices for indirect LAI estimation
Chapter 7. Comparison of software tools for analysis of hemispherical photographs
Chapter 8. Hemispherical photography in support of forest inventory and silviculture
Chapter 9. Canopy architecture models in support of methods using hemispherical photography
Chapter 10. Hemispherical photography for forestry: conclusions, applications, limitations, and implementation perspectives
Index

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