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Remotely assessing hollow availability using aerial photographs
Koch, AJ and Baker, SC (2011) Remotely assessing hollow availability using aerial photographs. Biodiversity and Conservation, 20. pp. 1089-1011.
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Tree hollows provide critical habitat for many species worldwide. The conservation of hollow-bearing trees presents a particular challenge for forest managers, partly due to difficulties in predicting their occurrence across a landscape. We trialled a novel approach for assessing relative hollow availability, by remotely estimating mature crown cover and senescence from aerial photographs in Tasmania, Australia. These estimates were tested against plot-based field assessments of actual occurrence of hollow-bearing trees. In dry forest we conducted ground-based surveys of hollows for all mature trees ([50 cm dbh) in 37 half-hectare plots. In wet forest, we conducted helicopter-based surveys of hollows for all mature trees in 45 oldgrowth plots (0.29–4.63 ha). Aerial photographs (1:10,000–1:25,000) were used to classify the senescence and cover of mature crowns in each plot. Regression analysis showed that, in dry forest, hollow-bearing tree densities were strongly related to the remote assessment of mature crown cover, with an 8% increase in variability explained if senescence was also included (R2 = 0.50). In wet forest, mature crown cover alone was the best model (R2 = 0.53 when outliers were removed). Assessing senescence was less important in dense wet forests than dry forest because trees take longer to form mature-shaped crowns and so mature-shaped crowns are more likely to have hollows. These results suggest that, with skilled photo-interpretation, aerial photographs can be useful for remotely assessing the relative density of hollowbearing trees. This approach has the potential to greatly improve conservation planning for hollows and hollow-dependent fauna.
|Journal or Publication Title:||Biodiversity and Conservation|
|Page Range:||pp. 1089-1011|
|Identification Number - DOI:||10.1007/s10531-011-0018-z|
|Additional Information:||The final publication is available at http://www.springerlink.com|
|Date Deposited:||07 Jun 2011 06:02|
|Last Modified:||18 Nov 2014 04:18|
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