REMOTETREE

Welcome

SCOPE & OBJECTIVES

Trees are live beings essential to terrestrial and human life. They play a major role in “keeping the earth’s green lung functioning”, regulating carbon and water cycles, preserving biodiversity, providing food and shadows, and overall maintaining a pleasant environment for life. However, the ecosystem services offered by trees are threatened by the increased impact of worldwide climate change and human activities, which are often combined.

The use of remote sensing data brings non destructive and high temporal observations with a global coverage to monitor tree ecosystems. They are used to derive spectral indices/metrics and vegetation biophysical/biochemical traits that are indirectly or directly the expression of the functional state of trees. But disentangling the contribution of abiotic and biotic stress factors on the health of trees remains a main current issue. They are mostly depending on the tree species and its surrounding environment, which is highly diverse between forests, urban areas and orchards, due to different atmospheric conditions, tree spatial arrangements and understory composition. The difficulty from the remote sensing prospect is to (i) account for all these dependencies through spectral, spatial and temporal scales, (ii) highlight the intra- and inter-specific variability of tree species traits and how they correlate with tree health status and (iii) target a global approach to generalize to several tree ecosystem types. In these aims, the presented work and available data focused on an accurate quantitative estimation of tree biophysical and biochemical traits from multi-scale, multi-modal and multi-platform remote sensing data, especially from inversion methods based on 3D physical modelling, using imaging spectroscopy, and targeting the tree individual for better management practices.

STUDY CASES & APPLICATIONS

Three tree ecosystems are studied with applications as diverse as forest fire risk prevention, increased drought impact, resource management and food safety, pressures on urban green spaces and biodiversity assessment. For more information, please visit the dedicated pages:

FOREST

URBAN

CROP

COLLABORATIONS & FUNDING

This work is performed in collaboration with scientists from international laboratories (Univ. of California Davis-CSTARS; Univ. of California Berkeley-Biomet Lab; Univ. of Massachusetts, Boston-Spectralmass lab; CSIC-SpecLab; Univ. of Cordoba-DAUCO) and national laboratories (UT3-CESBIO; CNRS-LETG; CNRS/IRD-CEFE; INRAE-TETIS/EMMAH/PSH/GAFL; Purpan-DYNAFOR; IRD-AMAP), and colleagues from ONERA-DOTA/DTIS/DEMR, and thanks to the funding provided by ONERA, CNES, NASA, ANR, EUR-TESS, Occitanie Region and Rennes metropolis.