Introduction to special section on Remote Characterization ofVegetation Structure: New Methods and Applications toLandscape-Regional-Global Scale ProcessesIntroduction to special section on Remote Characterization ofVegetation Structure: New Methods and Applications toLandscape-Regional-Global Scale Processes

摘要

This special section stems from three sessions focusing on the "RemoteCharacterization of Vegetation Structure" that were held at the fall meeting of theAmerican Geophysical Union (AGU) in December 2006, San Francisco. The sessionswere well attended with more than 40 abstracts covering a range of poster and oralpresentations. High levels of interest in this topic have led to the establishment of a defacto regular session within Biogeosciences at the fall meeting, with a similar number ofabstracts presented in 2007 and a session planned for December 2008. The goal of thesesessions was to highlight how recent advances in active and passive remote sensingtechnology, data acquisition methods, and analytical techniques could be used to bothcharacterize vegetation structural metrics at multiple scales, and to further understand howthese measures could be used as inputs in biogeochemical, biophysical, and ecologicalmodels. The papers in this special section represent the highlights of the latter objectiveand include participants from the conference special sessions, along with scientists fromthe wider scientific community. A companion special issue focusing on the formerobjective has been organized in the Canadian Journal of Remote Sensing and is due to bepublished in the fall of 2008. In this introduction, we provide context for this specialsection, summarize the main results of each contribution, and include suggestionsfor further strategic directions and activities in this area of research.