June 2012
Some great news for the SALCA project came in late June, in
the form of a further successful NERC grant to examine the potential for
monitoring vegetation moisture content at canopy scales. The New Investigator
Grant to Newcastle University (PI: Rachel Gaulton), with Mark Danson and Mat
Disney (UCL) as project partners, will fund a range of laboratory and field
experiments to examine SALCA response to drought stressed tree canopies and to
examine the potential for use of SALCA data and models, developed by UCL, to
upscale leaf physiological measurements to the canopy scales of relevance to
satellite measurements. The project will
kick-off in January 2013.
August 2012
To make the most of the beautiful British summer, we took
SALCA back out in the field to test out a potential application for
full-waveform TLS in hedgerow condition monitoring. This work, with France Gerard,
Jo Staley and Sam Amy from the UK's Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH) arose from
conversations in the back of a taxi after the FERA workshop and is intended to
test TLS for deriving structural characteristics of hedgerows, an important
habitat feature in the British countryside.
Needless to say the British weather rather let us down, with strong
winds giving way later in the day to sudden showers. With careful use of an
umbrella we managed to get some SALCA data and make some interesting field
measurements of hedge density and LAI, and work is on-going to investigate the
structural properties that could be extracted.
 |
| France Gerard and Sam Amy at the CEH testsite in Oxfordshire - with initial data visualisations of one of test hedges - and yes SALCA more or less waterproof! |
