Spatial relationships between trees play a fundamental role in forest ecosystems and their dynamics, governing together with other factors interaction, growth, mortality and regeneration processes of a plant community. Therefore the study of spatial relationships, i.e. spatial structure of a forest stand, is of great interest in plant ecology. It allows advancing our understanding of underlying ecological processes by testing hypotheses in a more refined way. When studying a forest or plant community spatial and temporal aspects are tightly coupled: Spatial patterns are the result of past ecological processes and temporal changes of individual trees depend on other trees and can therefore not be considered as independent units. Both, temporal and spatial relations between trees can be captured under modelling by hierarchical interactions. Unlike previous approaches, the new approach has the advantage of allowing a straightforward interpretation of its parameters in terms of inter-tree competition. According to the analysis, the random point process models with hierarchical interactions have the required flexibility to capture complex spatial tree patterns.
[Filmed during the May 2015 IBFRA conference in Rovaniemi, Finland using an iPad and FiLMiC Pro]
5 май 2016
