Forest ecology and management

Tropical forests store vast quantities of carbon in their living wood, and estimating how much depends on allometric models—mathematical relationships that predict a tree's total biomass from measurements like trunk diameter and height that are practical to collect in the field. Getting these estimates right matters because forest carbon stocks feed directly into national climate commitments, conservation policy, and our understanding of how much CO₂ forests can absorb as the climate shifts. Researchers are working to reduce the substantial uncertainty that still surrounds these models, particularly for poorly sampled species and forest types where generic equations can introduce large errors. An active frontier is building height-diameter models that account for how forest site productivity itself changes under altered rainfall and temperature regimes, since a tree's shape—and therefore its biomass—is not fixed but responds to the environment it grows in.

Works

132,216

Total citations

1,176,720

Keywords

Allometric ModelsBiomass EstimationCarbon StocksTropical ForestsTree AllometryForest Site Productivity