Abstract
Temperature is an important physical factor that is known to strongly affect biodiversity as well as ecosystems and their functioning. However, research in this area is still relatively limited; this may also be attributed to the multitude of influencing factors and the complexity of the statistics involved. This study analyzes the differences between the surface temperature of three Central European broadleaf tree species. A better understanding of these differences may help to elucidate the role of microclimate in biodiversity. We consider a time series of high-resolution thermal images taken from a meteorological observation tower and calculate mean canopy leaf temperatures for beech, ash and maple (Fagus silvatica, Fraxinus excelsior and Acer pseudoplatanus). In a first step, comparable image areas are extracted from the thermal image sections of the crown of each tree species avoiding shadow areas, branches, etc. We used an automatic segmentation technique, the Otsu thresholding. Extracted canopy leaf temperature values were then processed and the resulting temperature profiles estimated by O’Sullivan penalized splines. For comparing the differences in canopy leaf temperature over time, we propose the construction of simultaneous confidence bands. The analyses show that there are significant—though small—differences in canopy surface temperature between the three tree species.
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Acknowledgements
We thank the managers of the three Exploratories, Swen Renner, Kerstin Wiesner, Martin Gorke and all former managers for their work in maintaining the plot and project infrastructure; Simone Pfeiffer and Christiane Fischer for giving support through the central office, Michael Owonibi for managing the central data base, and Markus Fischer, Eduard Linsenmair, Dominik Hessenmöller, Daniel Prati, Ingo Schöning, François Buscot, Ernst-Detlef Schulze, Wolfgang W. Weisser and the late Elisabeth Kalko for their role in setting up the Biodiversity Exploratories project. The work has been (partly) funded by the DFG Priority Program 1374 “Infrastructure-Biodiversity-Exploratories” (KL894/14–1). Field work permits were issued by the responsible state environmental offices of Baden-Württemberg, Thüringen, and Brandenburg (according to § 72 BbgNatSchG). We gratefully acknowledge support by the Centre for Statistics, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen and the Research Training Group 1644 “Scaling Problems in Statistics”, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). Two anonymous referees and an associate editor provided valuable input that led to a significant improvement of the initial submission.
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Handling Editor: Bryan F. J. Manly.
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Vonrüti, M., Spasojevic, A., Nölke, N. et al. Comparing canopy leaf temperature of three Central European tree species based on simultaneous confidence bands for penalized splines. Environ Ecol Stat 24, 385–398 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10651-017-0375-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10651-017-0375-1