(Press-News.org) As digital cameras become better and cheaper, ecologists are turning these ubiquitous consumer devices into scientific tools to study how forests are responding to climate change. And, they say, digital cameras could be a cost-effective way of visually monitoring the spread of tree diseases. The results – which come from 38,000 photographs – are presented at this week's British Ecological Society's Annual Meeting at the University of Birmingham.
Because trees fix carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere and store carbon as biomass and soil organic matter, forests play a vital role in helping regulate climate change. Forests are also affected by climate change, with buds bursting sooner as spring arrives earlier, and ecologists need to understand how this process affects the amount of carbon trees can lock away from the atmosphere.
Studying how forests take up CO2 during photosynthesis is a complex and costly business involving a world-wide network called FLUXNET, which monitors the exchange of CO2 between the atmosphere and forests from more than 500 instrument towers worldwide using a technique known as eddy covariance. Now, Toshie Mizunuma of the University of Edinburgh has developed a way of using the seasonal changes in forest colour captured in digital photographs to calculate how much CO2 deciduous trees soak up.
"Reliably predicting CO2 flux isn't easy because it varies a lot due to changes in weather and alterations in forest metabolism caused by pests and diseases. We also still do not understand what controls the timing of leaves coming out in spring and falling in autumn. So we need a cheaper, simpler way of gathering this long-term data," Mizunuma explains.
To work out how to use digital cameras to capture this data, in 2009 the team working with Mizunuma set up two different camera systems in Alice Holt Forest, Hampshire. A commercial oak forest planted in the 1930s, Alice Holt contains a 90 ha research plot which is part of several long-term studies including the UK Environmental Change Network (ECN) and the European forest health network ICP Forests.
The two cameras were set at different angles: an outdoor webcam with a near-horizontal view and a commercial 'fish-eye' digital camera looking down at the canopy from the top of a tower. The cameras snapped photos every 30 minutes during daylight for two years – a total of 38,000 pictures, of which the four around midday were analysed.
She then analysed the colour of the forest canopy and compared it to FLUXNET measurements at the site: "The transition of colours from both cameras showed the seasonality of the forest: when budbreak started, the green sharply increased, gradually decreased in summer, and returned to the original level when leaves were shed; the rise of red colour was shown when oak leaves turned yellow in autumn. And the timing of the sharp increase in green coincided with the onset of carbon absorption."
"We estimated the carbon uptake using three fairly simple models, each using information about the level of incoming radiation, which is essential for photosynthesis. The modelled carbon uptake using 'hue', a parameter extracted from the photos, showed the strongest agreement with measured carbon uptake."
According to Mizunuma, the data confirm that digital cameras could be very useful in monitoring climate change effects in forests: "Our results suggest that digital cameras can be an important aid in monitoring forests and the colour signals can be a useful proxy for photosynthesis. Not only forests, one could install this system or one like it at any long term monitoring site. Long-term ecological observation is now crucial for study in climate change and biodiversity. Digital cameras provide long-run evident footage with relatively low cost without labour."
###Toshie Mizunuma will present her full findings at 12:45 on Thursday 20 December 2012 to the British Ecological Society's Annual Meeting at the University of Birmingham. The paper, Toshie Mizunuma et al (2012) "The relationship between carbon dioxide uptake and canopy colour from two camera systems in a deciduous forest in southern England", doi: 10.1111/1365-2435.12026, is published in Functional Ecology on 20 December 2012.
A three-minute video on the research is available at http://youtu.be/tbzcMrJi61Q
Pics, shoots and leaves: Ecologists turn digital cameras into climate change tools
2012-12-20
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
Environmental performance affected by ethnicity and religion
2012-12-20
Ethnically or religiously diverse countries underinvest in measures to improve their environmental performance, according to new research by an academic at the University of East Anglia (UEA).
Dr Elissaios Papyrakis also found that religious diversity has a more detrimental impact on environmental performance than ethnic differences. These social differences, if they cannot be overcome, may lower collective action and reduce public spending on environmental protection and performance.
The study, Environmental Performance in Socially Fragmented Countries, is published ...
Successful solo rock/pop stars twice as likely to die early as those in a band
2012-12-20
[Dying to be famous: retrospective cohort study of rock and pop star mortality and its association with adverse childhood experiences doi 10.1136/bmjopen-2012-002089]
Successful solo rock/pop stars are around twice as likely to die early as those in equally famous bands, indicates research published in the online journal BMJ Open.
And those who died of drug and alcohol problems were more likely to have had a difficult or abusive childhood than those dying of other causes, the findings showed.
The authors included 1489 North American and European rock and pop stars ...
Regular family meals together boost kids' fruit and vegetable intake
2012-12-20
[Family meals can help children reach their 5 A Day: a cross-sectional survey of children's dietary intake from London primary schools Online First doi 10.1136/jech-2012-201604]
Regular family meals round a table boosts kids' fruit and vegetable intake, and make it easier for them to reach the recommended five portions a day, indicates research published online in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.
The World Health Organization recommends a daily intake of five 80g portions of fruit and vegetables to promote good health and stave off serious disease and ...
Around 2 queries a week to UK poisons service concern...snakebites
2012-12-20
[Snakebite enquiries to the UK National Poisons Information Service: 2004-2010 doi 10.1136/emermed-2012-201587]
Snakebite injuries account for around two phone queries every week to the UK National Poisons Information Service, indicates an audit published online in Emergency Medicine Journal.
Changes in data recording mean that these figures are probably an underestimate of the true numbers of snakebite injuries in the UK, suggest the authors.
They audited telephone enquiries made to the Cardiff, Edinburgh, Birmingham and Newcastle units of the UK National Poisons ...
Gene therapy cocktail shows promise in long-term clinical trial for rare fatal brain disorder
2012-12-20
(Embargoed) CHAPEL HILL, N.C. – Results of a clinical trial that began in 2001 show that a gene therapy cocktail conveyed into the brain by a molecular special delivery vehicle may help extend the lives of children with Canavan disease, a rare and fatal neurodegenerative disorder.
A report of the trial appears in the Dec. 19, 2012 online edition of the journal Science Translational Medicine.
The form of gene therapy was created and developed at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine. The work was spearheaded by R. Jude Samulski, PhD, a study senior author, ...
New study sheds light on dinosaur size
2012-12-20
Dinosaurs were not only the largest animals to roam the Earth - they
also had a greater number of larger species compared to all other back-boned animals - scientists suggest in a new paper published in the journal PLOS ONE today.
The researchers, from Queen Mary, University of London, compared the size of the femur bone of 329 different dinosaur species from fossil records. The length and weight of the femur bone is a recognised method in palaeontology for estimating a dinosaur's body mass.
They found that dinosaurs follow the opposite pattern of body size distribution ...
Stem cell research shows ALS may be treatable
2012-12-20
Boston – Results from eleven independent ALS (Lou Gehrig's Disease) research studies are giving hope to the ALS community – showing for the first time that the disease may be treatable by targeting new mechanisms revealed by neural stem cell-based studies. A decade of research conducted at multiple institutions, shows that when neural stem cells were transplanted into multi-levels of the spinal cord of a mouse model with familial ALS, disease onset and progression slowed, motor and breathing function improved and treated mice survived three to four times longer than untreated ...
Impaired melatonin secretion may play a role in premenstrual syndrome
2012-12-20
A new study by Douglas Mental Health University Institute researchers shows altered body rhythms of the hormone melatonin in Premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD) women with insomnia. This finding may help explain some of the sleep disruptions experienced by women with PMDD, also known as premenstrual syndrome. PMDD is a mood disorder which appears in the week preceding menses, and affects about 3-8% of women. PMDD sufferers can experience depression, tension, and irritability of sufficient intensity to interfere with daily activities and relationships. Disturbed sleep ...
Genomic frontier: The unexplored animal kingdom
2012-12-20
HOUSTON -- (Dec. 19, 2012) -- A new report in the journal Nature unveils three of the first genomes from a vast, understudied swath of the animal kingdom that includes as many as one-quarter of Earth's marine species. By publishing the genomes of a leech, an ocean-dwelling worm and a kind of sea snail creature called a limpet, scientists from Rice University, the University of California-Berkeley and the Department of Energy's Joint Genome Institute (JGI) have more than doubled the number of genomes from a diverse group of animals called lophotrochozoans (pronounced: LOH-foh-troh-coh-zoh-uhns).
Lophotrochozoans ...
Inside the head of a dinosaur
2012-12-20
An international team of scientists, including PhD student Stephan Lautenschlager and Dr Emily Rayfield of the University of Bristol, found that the senses of smell, hearing and balance were well developed in therizinosaurs and might have affected or benefited from an enlarged forebrain. These findings came as a surprise to the researchers as exceptional sensory abilities would be expected from predatory and not necessarily from plant-eating animals.
Therizinosaurs are an unusual group of theropod dinosaurs which lived between 145 and 66 million years ago. Members ...