Characterizing Stand and Biomass Tables from Diameter Distribution Models: A Case Study for Mixed-Hardwood Forests in Eastern Tennessee, USA

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2-1-2022

Abstract

Accurately assessing forest structure and productivity is critical to making timely management decisions and monitoring plant communities. This study aims to evaluate the prediction accuracy of site-level stand and biomass tables from the diameter distribution models. The efficacy of the single Weibull function and two finite mixture models was compared for six species groups on three mixed-hardwood sites in eastern Tennessee, USA. To evaluate model performance, two types of stand/biomass tables were generated. The first type was constructed from all species on a given site (site-specific), whereas the second type was built for a single species from all sites (species-specific). Results indicate that both types of stand and biomass tables were consistently well quantified by the two-component mixture model in terms of goodness of fit, parsimony, and robustness. The two-component mixture model better characterized the complex, multimodal diameter distributions than the single Weibull model, which underpredicted the upper portion of the distributions. The three-component model tends to overfit the data, which results in lower prediction accuracy. Among the three models examined, the two-Weibull mixture model is suggested to construct site-level stand/biomass tables, which provides more reliable and accurate predictions to assess forest structure and product class.

Publication Source (Journal or Book title)

Forest Science

First Page

8

Last Page

16

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