Mapping the future of Laegern’s beech forest
Climate change is putting enormous pressure on biodiversity and ecosystems, including forests. In the first week of March, we gathered high-resolution 3D point clouds of the leaf-off beech forest at Laegern, our living laboratory near Zurich.
The forested Laegern mountain at the border of Zurich and Aargau is – like most European forests –a managed forest that is used for many purposes including recreation and lumber harvesting. At the same time, it provides a range of habitats for plants, birds, insects, fungi, microbes, and many other living things. The beech trees living on Laegern are especially important to understand what might happen to beech forests this century. Much of Europe is predicted to become inhospitable to beech with global change, and the trees are expected to retreat up mountains like Laegern.
For a better understanding of the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning in forests, we monitor beech trees at Laegern already for more than a decade. Click on the image below to have a look at the impressive high-resolution 3D point cloud!
| The 3D point cloud of the leaf-off beech forest at Laegern was generated using Structure-from-Motion (SfM) photogrammetry with a DJI Mavic 3 drone. The dataset consists of 2,284 images and contains 1,274,135,898 points, with a total flight time of 1.3 hours at about 80 m above ground level. A specialized flight pattern was employed, featuring an oblique camera angle of 70 degrees to maximize observation angles into the canopy. The resulting point cloud boasts a resolution of 2 cm and allows for the precise location of individual beech trees with centimeter accuracy. Acquired in the first week of March, the data collection and processing are largely automated, eliminating data acquisition as a bottleneck of close-range remote sensing approaches. |
Beech trees at Laegern have been monitored for more than a decade within the context of the University Research Priority Programme (URPP) on Global Change and Biodiversity, including by high-resolution remote sensing techniques that generate detailed multidimensional maps of species and forest functioning. In the last two years, a project led by WSL and UZH has established 32 plots across Laegern, regularly sampling the diversity of many species across trophic levels, aiming at better understanding the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning in this important ecosystem. As part of the NOMIS foundation-funded project Remotely Sensing Ecological Genomics, genomes have been sequenced for 300 of the forest’s beech trees to help researchers better understand features that may help these trees to adapt to rapidly changing conditions this century.
Felix Morsdorf, Meredith Schuman, Spatial Genetics