No abstract is provided for this article.
No abstract is provided for this article.
A life‐history trade‐off between low mortality in the dark and rapid growth in the light is one of the most widely accepted mechanisms underlying plant ecological strategies in tropical forests. Differences in plant functional traits are thought to underlie these distinct ecological strategies; however, very few studies have shown relationships between functional traits and demographic rates within a functional group. We present 8 years of growth and mortality data from saplings of 15 species of Dipterocarpaceae planted into logged‐over forest in Malaysian Borneo, and the relationships between these demographic rates and four key functional traits: wood density, specific leaf area ( SLA ), seed mass, and leaf C:N ratio. Species‐specific differences in growth rates were separated from seedling size effects by fitting nonlinear mixed‐effects models, to repeated measurements taken on individuals at multiple time points. Mortality data were analyzed using binary logistic regressions in a mixed‐effects models framework. Growth increased and mortality decreased with increasing light availability. Species differed in both their growth and mortality rates, yet there was little evidence for a statistical interaction between species and light for either response. There was a positive relationship between growth rate and the predicted probability of mortality regardless of light environment, suggesting that this relationship may be driven by a general trade‐off between traits that maximize growth and traits that minimize mortality, rather than through differential species responses to light. Our results indicate that wood density is an important trait that indicates both the ability of species to grow and resistance to mortality, but no other trait was correlated with either growth or mortality. Therefore, the growth mortality trade‐off among species of dipterocarp appears to be general in being independent of species crossovers in performance in different light environments.
No abstract is provided for this article.
No abstract is provided for this article.
Digital elevation models (DEMs) are at the core of most environmental process modelling and disaster management. In flood inundation modelling, surface elevation constitutes one of the most important model boundary conditions. With the availability of high-precision DEMs (e.g. LiDAR) and globally available DEMs (e.g. SRTM InSAR) a big step seems to have been taken in terms of hydraulic modelling application or hydraulic information retrieval from such DEMs, with high potential in particular for ungauged basins. Comparative studies exist that report on both the validation of different remotely sensed elevation sources and their use for both hydrologic and hydraulic studies. To contribute to the existing literature on DEMs and hydraulic information, this study aims at comparing water stages derived from LiDAR, topographic contours and SRTM. A flood inundation model calibrated with distributed ground-surveyed high water marks is used to evaluate the remotely sensed water stages. The results show that, as expected, LiDAR derived water stages exhibit the lowest RMSE (0.35 m), followed by the contour DEM (0.7 m). A relatively good performance of the SRTM (1.07 m), which is possibly linked to the low-lying floodplain, suggests that the SRTM is a valuable source for initial vital flood information extraction in large, homogeneous floodplains. Subsequent 3D flood mapping from remotely sensed water stages confirms this but also indicates that flood mapping with low-resolution, low-precision surface elevation data is hardly possible on the small scale, as the accuracy of the resulting map depends too much on DEM uncertainties and errors both in the horizontal and vertical directions.
No abstract is provided for this article.
The diversity of data sources, analysis methodologies, and classification systems has led to a number of new techniques for monitoring land-cover change. However, this wide choice means that it is difficult to know which solution to choose. A system capable of integrating the results of different analyses and applying them to land-cover mapping would therefore be extremely useful. This study investigates the use of evidence pooling and neural networks in land-cover mapping. Neural networks were used to classify land-cover using evidence from spectral (Landsat-7 ETM� ), textural, and topographic information. Mapping was performed using combinations of evidence source and evidence pooling techniques. The best performance was achieved using all available information with a method that summed evidence directly instead of categorizing it. While the methodology failed to reach the level of accuracy recommended elsewhere, a comparison of the number of classes used with other methods showed that the system performed better than these approaches.