Further SALCA Diaries Update

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!