A remote sensing derived dataset of 100 million individual tree crowns for the National Ecological Observatory Network
- University of Florida, United States
- University of Wisconsin - Madison, United States
Abstract
Forests provide biodiversity, ecosystem and economic services. Information on individual trees is important for understanding forest ecosystems but obtaining individual-level data at broad scales is challenging due to the costs and logistics of data collection. While advances in remote sensing techniques allow surveys of individual trees at unprecedented extents, there remain technical challenges in turning sensor data into tangible information. Using deep learning methods, we produced an open-source dataset of individual-level crown estimates for 100 million trees at 37 sites across the United States surveyed by the National Ecological Observatory Network's Airborne Observation Platform. Each canopy tree crown is represented by a rectangular bounding box and includes information on the height, crown area, and spatial location of the tree. These data have the potential to drive significant expansion of individual-level research on trees by facilitating both regional analyses and cross-region comparisons encompassing forest types from most of the United States.
Data availability
The dataset is available at https://zenodo.org/record/3765872#.X2J1zZNKjOQ
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation (GBMF4563)
- Ethan P White
National Science Foundation (1926542)
- Stephanie A Bohlman
- Alina Zare
- Aditya Singh
- Ethan P White
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2021, Weinstein et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
Metrics
-
- 5,252
- views
-
- 434
- downloads
-
- 44
- citations
Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.
Download links
A two-part list of links to download the article, or parts of the article, in various formats.
Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)
Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)
Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)
A remote sensing derived dataset of 100 million individual tree crowns for the National Ecological Observatory Network
eLife 10:e62922.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.62922
Further reading
-
- Ecology
- Evolutionary Biology
Understanding the origins of novel, complex phenotypes is a major goal in evolutionary biology. Poison frogs of the family Dendrobatidae have evolved the novel ability to acquire alkaloids from their diet for chemical defense at least three times. However, taxon sampling for alkaloids has been biased towards colorful species, without similar attention paid to inconspicuous ones that are often assumed to be undefended. As a result, our understanding of how chemical defense evolved in this group is incomplete. Here, we provide new data showing that, in contrast to previous studies, species from each undefended poison frog clade have measurable yet low amounts of alkaloids. We confirm that undefended dendrobatids regularly consume mites and ants, which are known sources of alkaloids. Thus, our data suggest that diet is insufficient to explain the defended phenotype. Our data support the existence of a phenotypic intermediate between toxin consumption and sequestration — passive accumulation — that differs from sequestration in that it involves no derived forms of transport and storage mechanisms yet results in low levels of toxin accumulation. We discuss the concept of passive accumulation and its potential role in the origin of chemical defenses in poison frogs and other toxin-sequestering organisms. In light of ideas from pharmacokinetics, we incorporate new and old data from poison frogs into an evolutionary model that could help explain the origins of acquired chemical defenses in animals and provide insight into the molecular processes that govern the fate of ingested toxins.
-
- Ecology
Tracking wild pigs with GPS devices reveals how their social interactions could influence the spread of disease, offering new strategies for protecting agriculture, wildlife, and human health.
