Pierre Ploton

Institute of Research for Development | IRD · 123 - Plant Architecture, Functioning and Evolution (AMAP)

accurate mapping and monitoring of tropical forests aboveground biomass (aGB) is crucial to design effective carbon emission reduction strategies and improving our understanding of Earth's carbon cycle. However, existing large-scale maps of tropical forest aGB generated through combinations of Earth Observation (EO) and forest inventory data show m...

Trees structure the Earth’s most biodiverse ecosystem, tropical forests. The vast number of tree species presents a formidable challenge to understanding these forests, including their response to environmental change, as very little is known about most tropical tree species. A focus on the common species may circumvent this challenge. Here we inve...

Remotely sensed maps of forest carbon stocks have enormous potential for supporting greenhouse gas (GHG) inventory and monitoring in tropical countries. However, most countries have not used maps as the reference data for GHG inventory due to the lack of confidence in the accuracy of maps and of data to perform local validation. Here, we use the fi...

Data capturing multiple axes of tree size and shape, such as a tree's stem diameter, height and crown size, underpin a wide range of ecological research - from developing and testing theory on forest structure and dynamics, to estimating forest carbon stocks and their uncertainties, and integrating remote sensing imagery into forest monitoring prog...

Woody encroachment and forest progression are widespread in forest-savanna transitional areas in Central Africa. Quantifying these dynamics and understanding their drivers at relevant spatial scales has long been a challenge. Recent progress in open access imagery sources with improved spatial, spectral and temporal resolution combined with cloud c...

Improving the global monitoring of above‐ground biomass (AGB) is crucial for forest management to be effective in climate mitigation. In the last decade, methods have been developed for estimating AGB from terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) data. TLS‐derived AGB estimates can address current uncertainties in allometric and Earth observation (EO) meth...

When ordinating plots of tropical rain forests using stand-level structural attributes such as biomass, basal area and the number of trees in different size classes, two patterns often emerge: a gradient from poorly to highly stocked plots and high positive correlations between biomass, basal area and the number of large trees. These patterns are i...

In tropical forests, the high proportion of trees showing irregularities at the stem base complicates forest monitoring. For example, in the presence of buttresses, the height of the point of measurement (HPOM) of the stem diameter (DPOM) is raised from 1.3 m, the standard breast height, up to a regular part of the stem. While DPOM is the most impo...

Africa is forecasted to experience large and rapid climate change1 and population growth2 during the twenty-first century, which threatens the world’s second largest rainforest. Protecting and sustainably managing these African forests requires an increased understanding of their compositional heterogeneity, the environmental drivers of forest comp...

Background and aims Terrestrial LiDAR scanning (TLS) data are of great interest in forest ecology and management because they provide detailed 3D information on tree structure. Automated pipelines are increasingly used to process TLS data and extract various tree- and plot-level metrics. With these developments comes the risk of unknown reliability...

the full text can be found at: https://lpvs.gsfc.nasa.gov/PDF/CEOS_WGCV_LPV_Biomass_Protocol_2021_V1.0.pdf

Aim Tree crowns determine light interception, carbon and water exchange. Thus, understanding the factors causing tree crown allometry to vary at the tree and stand level matters greatly for the development of future vegetation modelling and for the calibration of remote sensing products. Nevertheless, we know little about large‐scale variation and...

Aim: Tree crowns determine light interception, carbon and water exchange. Thus, understanding the factors causing tree crown allometry to vary at the tree and stand level matters greatly for the development of future vegetation modelling and for the calibration of remote sensing products. Nevertheless, we know little about large‐scale variation and...

To fulfil their growth and reproductive functions, trees develop a three‐dimensional structure that is subject to both internal and external constraints. This is reflected by the unique architecture of each individual at a given time. Addressing the crown dimensions and topological structure of large tropical trees is challenging considering their...

Mapping aboveground forest biomass is central for assessing the global carbon balance. However, current large-scale maps show strong disparities, despite good validation statistics of their underlying models. Here, we attribute this contradiction to a flaw in the validation methods, which ignore spatial autocorrelation (SAC) in data, leading to ove...

Forest biomass is key in Earth carbon cycle and climate system, and thus under intense scrutiny in the context of international climate change mitigation initiatives (e.g. REDD+). In tropical forests, the spatial distribution of aboveground biomass (AGB) remains, however, highly uncertain. There is increasing recognition that progress is strongly l...

Aim Examining tree species‐environment association can offer insight into the drivers of vegetation patterns and key information of practical relevance to forest management. Here, we aim to quantify the contribution of climate and soil gradients to variation in Central African tree species composition (abundance and occurrence). Location Tropical...

Precise accounting of carbon stocks and fluxes in tropical vegetation using remote sensing approaches remains a challenging exercise, as both signal saturation and ground sampling limitations contribute to inaccurate extrapolations. Airborne LiDAR Scanning (ALS) data can be used as an intermediate level to radically increase sampling and enhance mo...

Half of Asian tropical forests were disturbed in the last century resulting in the dominance of secondary forests in Southeast Asia. However, the rate at which biomass accumulates during the recovery process in these forests is poorly understood. We studied a forest landscape located in Khao Yai National Park (Thailand) that experienced strong dist...

Wood density (WD) relates to important tree functions such as stem mechanics and resistance against pathogens. This functional trait can exhibit high intraindividual variability both radially and vertically. With the rise of LiDAR-based methodologies allowing nondestructive tree volume estimations, failing to account for WD variations related to tr...

Direct and semidirect estimations of leaf area (LA) and leaf area index (LAI) are scarce in dense tropical forests despite their importance in calibrating remote-sensing products, forest dynamics and biogeochemical models. We destructively sampled 61 trees belonging to 13 most abundant species in a semideciduous forest in southeastern Cameroon. For...

Half of Asian tropical forests were disturbed in the last century resulting in the dominance of secondary forests in Southeast Asia. However, the rate at which biomass accumulates during the recovery process in these forests is poorly understood. We studied a forest landscape located in Khao Yai National Park (Thailand) that experienced strong dist...

Forest biomass monitoring is at the core of the research agenda due to the critical importance of forest dynamics in the carbon cycle. However, forest biomass is never directly measured; thus, upscaling it from trees to stand or larger scales (e.g., countries, regions) relies on a series of statistical models that may propagate large errors. Here,...

Aim Large tropical trees form the interface between ground and airborne observations, offering a unique opportunity to capture forest properties remotely and to investigate their variations on broad scales. However, despite rapid development of metrics to characterize the forest canopy from remotely sensed data, a gap remains between aerial and fie...

Aim: Large tropical trees form the interface between ground and airborne observations, offering a unique opportunity to capture forest properties remotely and to investigate their variations on broad scales. However, despite rapid development of metrics to characterize the forest canopy from remotely sensed data, a gap remains between aerial and fi...

With the improvement of remote sensing techniques for forest inventory application such as terrestrial LiDAR, tree volume can now be measured directly, without resorting to allometric equations. However, wood specific gravity (WSG) remains a crucial factor for converting these precise volume measurements into unbiased biomass estimates. In addition...

Aim: Large tropical trees form the interface between ground and airborne observations, offering a unique opportunity to capture forest properties remotely and to investigate their variations on broad scales. However, despite rapid development of metrics to characterize the forest canopy from remotely sensed data, a gap remains between aerial and fi...

Aim: Large tropical trees form the interface between ground and airborne observations, offering a unique opportunity to capture forest properties remotely and to investigate their variations on broad scales. However, despite rapid development of metrics to characterize the forest canopy from remotely sensed data, a gap remains between aerial and fi...

Calibration of local, regional or global allometric equations to estimate biomass at the tree level constitutes a significant burden on projects aiming at reducing Carbon emissions from forest degradation and deforestation. The objective of this contribution is to assess the precision and accuracy of Terrestrial Laser Scanning ( TLS ) for estimatin...

Very high spatial resolution (VHSR) optical satellite imagery has shown good potential to provide non-saturating proxies of tropical forest aboveground biomass (AGB) from the analysis of canopy texture, for instance through the Fourier Transform Textural Ordination method. Empirical case studies however showed that the relationship between Fourier...

Key message Across five biogeographic areas, DBH-CA allometry was characterized by inter-site homogeneity and intra-site heterogeneity, whereas the reverse was observed for DBH-H allometry. Abstract Tree crowns play a central role in stand dynamics. Remotely sensed canopy images have been shown to allow inferring stand structure and biomass which s...

Remote sensing is revolutionizing the way we study forests, and recent technological advances mean we are now able - for the first time - to identify and measure the crown dimensions of individual trees from airborne imagery. Yet to make full use of these data for quantifying forest carbon stocks and dynamics, a new generation of allometric tools w...

Background. Analyzing floristic composition is important to understand species diversity and its response to varying environmental factors. As such, the focus of previous papers has been on selected species or local scales. We assessed the explanatory power of environmental factors on species distribution in the central African rainforest. We aimed...

Recent studies have questioned the applicability of satellite-derived vegetation indices (VIs) for evaluating phenological variation in tropical forests, due to potential artifacts caused by the bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF). For nadir-normalized data, BRDF will be driven principally by intraannual variation in solar elevat...

Accurately monitoring tropical forest carbon stocks is a challenge that remains outstanding. Allometric models that consider tree diameter, height and wood density as predictors are currently used in most tropical forest carbon studies. In particular, a pantropical biomass model has been widely used for approximately a decade, and its most recent v...

Accurately monitoring tropical forest carbon stocks is an outstanding challenge. Allometric models that consider tree diameter, height and wood density as predictors are currently used in most tropical forest carbon studies. In particular, a pantropical biomass model has been widely used for approximately a decade, and its most recent version will...

Large tropical trees and a few dominant species were recently identified as the main structuring elements of tropical forests. However, such result did not translate yet into quantitative approaches which are essential to understand, predict and monitor forest functions and composition over large, often poorly accessible territories. Here we show t...

S pace observation is acknowledged as quintessential for providing reliable baseline assessment and monitoring strategies for vegetation at multiple scales over extensive territories with a low population and limited accessibility. Optical satellite imagery represents the major source of data and covers an ample continuum of image resolution and sw...

Terrestrial carbon stock mapping is important for the successful implementation of climate change mitigation policies. Its accuracy depends on the availability of reliable allometric models to infer oven-dry aboveground biomass of trees from census data. The degree of uncertainty associated with previously published pantropical aboveground biomass...

The structural organization of a forest canopy is an important descriptor that may provide spatial information for vegetation mapping and management planning, such as attributes of plant species distributions, intensity of disturbances, aboveground biomass or carbon stock. A variety of airborne and satellite images characterize forest stands from a...

Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) in efforts to combat climate change requires participating countries to periodically assess their forest resources on a national scale. Such a process is particularly challenging in the tropics because of technical difficulties related to large aboveground forest biomass stocks, re...

The structural organization of a forest canopy is an important descriptor that may provide spatial information on above-ground biomass and carbon stock estimate. We test here the potential of a powerful method of canopy texture analysis from very-high remotely sensed images, such as commercial IKONOS or freely available Google EarthTM images, for s...