Counting marmots…
Bridges remote-sensing methodology, forest demography, and mountain hydrology by treating individual-tree LiDAR matching as both an inferential and an ecophysiological scaling problem.
Drone-mounted LiDAR and repeat aerial scanning now make it possible to track individual trees through time across mountain forests, opening a path to demography and growth measurement at scales previously reserved for plot-based dendrochronology. Pairing canopy structure captured from above with stem-level measurements from increment cores and dendrometer bands could connect carbon allocation, climate response, and stand dynamics in conifer forests of the Upper Gunnison and similar montane watersheds. Realizing that potential depends on whether tree-matching and growth-inference methods that work on small demonstration plots remain trustworthy when applied across heterogeneous terrain, species mixtures, and varying acquisition geometries.
The unresolved questions sit at the junction of remote-sensing methodology, forest demography, and ecophysiology. On the methods side, it is unclear how individual-tree record linkage between repeat LiDAR campaigns degrades as scan overlap decreases, stem density increases, or canopy architecture varies — and whether the uncertainty estimates from hierarchical Bayesian linkage remain well-calibrated under those stresses. On the biology side, lagged couplings between canopy volume growth and subsequent stem diameter growth, observed in Engelmann spruce, need testing for generality across species, topographic positions, and water-availability gradients before they can anchor stand- or watershed-scale carbon and growth models. Bridging the two requires concurrent canopy and stem measurement campaigns designed not just to estimate growth but to validate the inferential machinery that scales individual-tree observations to populations. Integration with snowpack duration, topographic wetness, and species-resolved stand maps would turn tree-level demography into a watershed-scale process model.
The primary blockers are method-validation gaps (linkage uncertainty has been demonstrated only in limited settings), scale mismatch between plot-based dendrochronology and landscape LiDAR, and data gaps in concurrent multi-stream measurements (paired canopy and stem time series across species, topography, and snowpack regimes). Coordination gaps also matter: remote-sensing teams, forest demographers, and watershed hydrologists typically operate on separate field campaigns and timelines, and integrated acquisition protocols across these communities are not yet standard.
A targeted path forward would assemble a multi-temporal drone-LiDAR campaign deliberately structured with systematically varying scan overlap and acquired across forest types that span the structural and species diversity of the Upper Gunnison. Pairing those flights with co-located dendrometer band networks and increment core sampling — stratified by species, elevation, topographic wetness, and snowpack duration class — would generate the joint canopy-stem time series needed to test growth-lag generality. Simulation studies using virtual forests with known ground truth could stress-test the linkage model independently, isolating where uncertainty propagation fails. A coupled framework that ingests LiDAR-derived individual-tree growth, hierarchical demographic models, and stand-level climate and hydrology covariates would let the community move from demonstration to operational watershed-scale demographic inference. Open data products — species-resolved stand maps, tree-matched growth records, and uncertainty layers — would let downstream carbon, fuels, and hydrology modelers build on the foundation.
Concrete, fundable actions categorized by kind of work and effort tier (near-term = single lab; ambitious = focused multi-year program; major = multi-institutional; consortium = agency-program scale).
Descriptions of needed data (not existing datasets), drawn directly from the atomic statements feeding this frontier.
Immediate beneficiaries are forest ecologists, remote-sensing methodologists, and watershed-scale carbon modelers who need credible individual-tree demographic data outside the constraints of plot-based dendrochronology. If validated, lagged canopy-stem growth relationships and watershed-scale tree demography would inform county-level fuels planning and conifer management in the Gunnison Basin, support BLM and Forest Service stand-treatment decisions, and improve inputs to regional carbon accounting. Snowpack-coupled growth inference would also be of interest to hydrology modelers working alongside Bureau of Reclamation and CWCB planning processes, though the primary near-term impact is methodological — establishing whether LiDAR-based demography is a trustworthy tool for management-scale forest assessment.
Every claim in the synthesis above derives from the source atomic statements below, grouped by their research neighborhood of origin. Click a neighborhood to follow its primer and full citation chain.
Framing notes: Management framing kept measured because only one source statement carried explicit management relevance; the frontier is primarily a methods-to-application bridge.