BEYOND POTENTIAL VEGETATION: COMBINING LIDAR DATA AND A HEIGHT-STRUCTURED MODEL FOR CARBON STUDIES.

The article presents a study which assesses the potential for using lidar observations of tropical forest structure to initialize the ecosystem demography model for improved estimates of carbon stocks and fluxes. It indicates that lidar data provided substantial constraints on model estimates of carbon stocks and net carbon fluxes. The results the study provide a promising illustration of the power of combining lidar data on vegetation height with a height-structured ecosystem model.