| Dendromorphometry
and beyond |
Robert
Leverett |
| Apr
09, 2007 09:52 PDT |
ENTS,
I keep polishing the slide presentation that I'll be giving on
dendromorphometry on April 21st at Cook Forest on behalf of
myself, Gary
Beluzo, and Will Blozan. It isn't too late to recommend specific
topics
for inclusion. Dale has promised lots of coffee (and donuts I
presume)
to keep everybody alert. We'll periodically cycle around and
check
peoples' pulses. Don't want to lose anyone either from my
presentation
or the coffee.
As I wade through the applications of simple geometry and
trigonometry
to tree measuring that we use as we pursue our passion in the
field, it
occurs to me that other interests, be they stamp collecting or
mountain
climbing, have exhibited courses of development toward increased
sophistication. Why should our craft be any different? However,
tree
measuring as pursued in the East, outside of commercial
applications,
was stuck in the same place for years until ENTS came along.
ENTS has
since pushed the envelope. However, I expect other groups will
eventually spring up, adopt our methods, pioneer some of their
own, and
further the trade, for the potential benefit of all. That's the
way it
is supposed to happen. I hope ENTS, as an organization, will be
supportive of advancements made by non-ENTS groups that might
see
themselves in competition with us. But until that happens, and
we are
tested, onward we will go pretty much alone.
Although we intend to eventually produce a
coauthored book on
dendromorphometry that will develop our trade and put in on a
solid
theoretical foundation, in the interim, we will continue
presenting our
tree measurement techniques as straightforward applications of
plane
geometry, plane trignometry, and algebra along with some handy
computer
programs to compute statistics and hopefully reveal information
from out
datasets that is not otherwise obvious. The small group of us
who
engineer the methods will try to select only the most
efficacious
techniques for mass consumption and present them as
straightforwardly as
possible. It will be the rest of you who decide if I have
succeeded in
distilling the best of what we do in the upcoming presentation.
However,
I may never fully know if I succeeded as opposed to it being the
strength of Dale's coffee.
Bob
Robert T. Leverett
Cofounder, Eastern Native Tree Society
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