Individual tree crowns leaf traits from remote sensing

Functional ecology has increasingly focused on describing ecological communities based on their traits (measurable features affecting individuals fitness and performance). Analyzing trait distributions within and among forests could significantly improve understanding of community composition and ecosystem function. Historically, data on trait distributions are generated by (1) collecting a small number of leaves from a small number of trees, which suffers from limited sampling but produces information at the fundamental ecological unit (the individual); or (2) using remote sensing images to infer traits, producing information continuously across large regions, but as plots (containing multiple trees of different species) or pixels, not individuals. Remote sensing methods that identify individual trees and estimate their traits would provide the benefits of both approaches, producing continuous large-scale data linked to biological individuals. We used data from the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) to develop a method to scale up functional traits from 160 trees to the millions of trees within the spatial extent of two NEON sites. The pipeline consists of three stages: 1) image segmentation, to identify individual trees and estimate structural traits; 2) ensemble of models to infer leaf mass area (LMA), nitrogen, carbon, and phosphorus content using hyperspectral signatures, and DBH from allometry; and 3) predictions for segmented crowns for the full remote sensing footprint at the NEON sites.