Introduction to special section on remote characterization of vegetation structure: New methods and applications to landscape-regional-global scale processes

Abstract

This special section stems from three sessions focusing on the "Remote Characterization of Vegetation Structure" that were held at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in December 2006, San Francisco. The sessions were well attended with more than 40 abstracts covering a range of poster and oral presentations. High levels of interest in this topic have led to the establishment of a de facto regular session within Biogeosciences at the fall meeting, with a similar number of abstracts presented in 2007 and a session planned for December 2008. The goal of these sessions was to highlight how recent advances in active and passive remote sensing technology, data acquisition methods, and analytical techniques could be used to both characterize vegetation structural metrics at multiple scales, and to further understand how these measures could be used as inputs in biogeochemical, biophysical, and ecological models. The papers in this special section represent the highlights of the latter objective and include participants from the conference special sessions, along with scientists from the wider scientific community. A companion special issue focusing on the former objective has been organized in the Canadian Journal of Remote Sensing and is due to be published in the fall of 2008. In this introduction, we provide context for this special section, summarize the main results of each contribution, and include suggestions for further strategic directions and activities in this area of research. Copyright 2008 by die American Geophysical Union.