PARENT SESSION
OOS 22: Forest Canopies as Participants in Ecosystem and Landscape Ecology.
Organized by: NM Nadkarni and DC Shaw
Wednesday, August 4, 1:30 PM to 5:00 PM, Meeting Room E 143.

Categorizing forest structure: A conceptual approach.

Nadkarni, Nalini^*,1, Cushing, Judith¹, Fiala, Anne ¹, ¹ The Evergreen State College, Olympia, Washington, USA

ABSTRACT- Ecological data are inherently spatial at the ecosystem and landscape levels. In particular, the complex structure of forest ecosystems – the arrangement and amount of their constituent components of leaves, stems, and air –determines many of their critical functions and composition, such as forest-atmosphere interactions and physiology. However, no single system for classifying forest structure has been developed. We present an ecological synthesis of canopy spatial relationships based on a populated set of categories of forest space that will help organize empirical data on forest structure, and may serve as a model for other ecological disciplines. This conceptual model for forest structure includes forests of different composition, age, and location. We draw upon 118 studies of forest structure and forest structure/function relationships that have appeared in the literature since 1964. From these, we abstracted the core structural entities that were measured or estimated, and the overall elements of forest structure that were described, analyzed, or represented. We present an exhaustive multidimensional scheme to categorize forest structure, related to "representations" (components, networks, or media), dimensionality, spatial referencing, and reactivity. We populate these categories by assigning existing forest structure structures to unique "addresses" within the overall conceptual structure. We suggest applications of this to better understand forest ecology, including the generation of "join points", common visualization tools, and shared statistical methods.

Key words: forest structure, forest ecology, theory, forest canopies