This data product contains the quality-controlled, native sampling resolution data from in-situ measurements of live and standing dead woody individuals and shrub groups, from all terrestrial NEON sites with qualifying woody vegetation. With some modifications, this protocol adopts guidelines established by the U.S. Forest Service (2012) for measuring tree species. The exact measurements collected per individual depend on growth form, and these measurements are focused on enabling biomass and productivity estimation, estimation of shrub volume and biomass, and calibration / validation of multiple NEON airborne remote-sensing data products.
Our analyses focus on the relationship between individual stem height and diameter and how that relationship varies across growth forms.
Data Preparation
Data was prepared for analysis by:
Compiling all individual raw data files into a single table.
Merging individual data with plot level data and geolocating individuals.
The data preparation steps are contained in the data-raw/individual.R script.
Summary statistics
Prepared data were subset to columns of interest stem_diameter, height and growth_form and rows were filtered to complete cases. Liana growth forms were removed.
Code
## Set up ----# Load librarieslibrary(dplyr)library(ggplot2)# Load dataindividual <- readr::read_csv( here::here("data", "individual.csv")) |>select(stem_diameter, height, growth_form)## Subset analysis data ----analysis_df <- individual %>%filter(complete.cases(.), growth_form !="liana")## Order growth form levels gf_levels <-table(analysis_df$growth_form) |>sort() |>names()analysis_df <- analysis_df |>mutate(growth_form =factor(growth_form, levels = gf_levels))
The final data set contains a total of 11626 data points.
Table 1
Figure 1: Distribution of individual counts across growth forms.
Figure 1 shows the distribution of individual counts across growth forms in the dataset.
Figure 2: Distribution of log stem diameter and log height across growth forms.
Figure 2 shows the log distribution of stem diameter and log height across growth forms.
Analysis
Modeling overall stem_diameter as a function of height
Initially we fit a linear model of form log(stem_diameter) as a function of log(height).
THORNLEY, JOHN H. M. 1999. “Modelling Stem Height and Diameter Growth in Plants.”Annals of Botany 84 (2): 195–205. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1006/anbo.1999.0908.