My day has felt like the Matrix movie…

Working to create a 3D leaf area density map of my study area… Challenging!

Leaf grinding for isotope analyses

going up!

Excuse the delay in updates, been overwhelmed with field work, job related activities, remote sensing analysis and modeling for our Amazon project. All is moving well, here is the tally for the Hawaii project:

Canopy LiCOR days left: 3-4.

Understory LiCOR days left: 3-6.

Interior Forest Microclimate Sites left: 3-4.

Biodiversity leaf area density transects: 2-3 days.

Almost there! Wonderful, especially with the intense rains we’ve been having these last weeks.

Here are some nice panoramic photos from recent field work:

Finished tree 4 of 20; a few weeks to go.

Received a new PAR sensor (w/ 28 m cable) to replace one that shorted out in the interior forest micro-climate array. This will also be a good opportunity to test the calibration of the other 3 interior forest sensors.

 

Heading to the field today to take down interior forest sensors, download top of canopy low and high elevation tower data, replace desiccant, and then perform the PAR calibration back here at the house.

Nice ArcMAP extension allowing for simultaneous comparison of points in Arc and Google Earth. Can be downloaded….search for something like: Arc2Google ArcMAP extension.

Excellent! Making rapid progress on road mapping and validation!! Angelica has done amazing with the Quickbird imagery. Here is a small low resolution subset of our study area.

Finally, the finished river/water mask for a small subset (low res version) around Puerto Maldonado (Peruvian Amazon) in our study area!

3 sites down, 17 to go!

Calibration and installation of our sensors. Unfortunately one of our PAR sensors shorted out, will have to send it back to Apogee and have it replaced when we take them down next week.

Soil gas efflux sampling for Kye (Stanford Post-doc) project linking remote sensing with soil C02 emissions. These samples will be analyzed on a GC (Gas Chromatograph) back at Stanford in the upcoming month.

4 7 ml samples every 20 minutes for 4 cycles.

car full of gear for canopy licoring.

angelica and I heading out for the first load.

stacks of gear, including our climbing equipment and safety gear and hanging chair for long canopy sessions.

Ready to go!

Stack of climbing and LiCORing gear ready to go.

Angelica and Kai leading up georeferencing operations on the ground.

Collecting our 4th curve set!

one failed but interesting approach to classifying images using hierarchical trees.

Multi image stacking that’s been driving me crazy these last weeks. Just completed the first mosaic, 2008, comprised of ~30 images, yes! Running a despeckling program in IDL, hope it looks good.

Here is an example of the core of the despeckler procedure:

I’ve been planning to optimize it to run without the use of for loops, however at the moment this is just not necessary given we only have 3 mosaics to run (but it would go from 30 minutes processing time to probably around 30 seconds!).

Sensors and climbing gear ready to load into the truck. Leaf dryer in LL corner.

Full climbing setup for LiCOR 6400 canopy work up to 100 ft. Sweet! The climbing gear for climber is a stored in a separate larger backpack.

02/01/11

System for canopy LiCOR measurements. Allows for ground based assistants to lift the LiCOR into the canopy, then fine adjustments via the climber.

 

System now including the extension for the cuvette head. This version will be cleaned prior to starting measurements on Wed or Thur. I’ll post a photo of the final cleaned setup before we head out.

01/27/11

Close up of fern fronds used for LiCOR 6400 analyses. These are scanned at 600 dpi and used for area calculation prior to drying and lab analysis.

01/26/11

Week of Jan 24th 2011

Rapid progress on understory LiCOR curve sets.

01/13/2011

Removed the sensors for calibration. Putting them up again early next week.

Angelica carrying a full geo-referencing kit.

LiCOR 6400 on the back, essential gear on the front. Ready to go!

Set up in the woods.

01/10-12/2011–Mon-Wed

LiCORing in the rain. Good progress on understory curves. Fixed a mystery leak, hard to track down, but ultimately solved by tightening a few screws around the cuvette head. A matter of 0.8 ppm C02 variation…