High resolution forest-landscape interactions

In forested landscapes, trees drive and modulate both advective and diffusive sediment transport processes. These relationships represent complex feedbacks between topography and vegetation. Root growth and tree throw drive diffusive soil creep, whilst root cohesion is a contributing factor in advective processes including landsliding and debris flows. In turn, landscape morphology modulates water, nutrient, and light availability and has been observed to cause significant variability in the structure and composition of forests across scales. To fully explore this topic, a confluence of robust, high resolution measurements of landscape and tree morphology is required alongside long term monitoring data, which has hitherto been unavailable at the appropriate spatial scale.

Working across a range of European forest ecosystems, coupling long term measurements of forest structure with newly acquired high resolution topographic data, we have constructed an unprecedented 3D dataset of European forest-landscape dynamics. We segment individual trees from combined UAV LiDAR and terrestrial laser scanning campaigns, compute tree structural metrics, and link them to localised topographic metrics computed using LSDTopoTools. Using these data we explore the inter- and intra- specific relationships between topography and individual trees and demonstrate the potential to fundamentally link geomorphic and ecological process through coupled field and computational research.