Table 1.
Technical specifications for the ALS data that were acquired and summary of field variables for both study sites.
Table 2.
List of the eight most abundant species at each study site.
Species are ranked in order of decreasing abundance.
Table 3.
Description and summary of forest structure variables derived from ALS data.
With zi corresponding to the aboveground height of an ALS point i, n to the total number of ALS points, and N to the total number of 1 m2 grid cells in the plot. Variables were extracted from circular plots with the same radius as the field plots (9 m at the Lowland site (L) and 15 m at the Mountain site (M) respectively). Vegetation points inferior to 2 m were considered to belong to the understory and were not taken into account as tree vegetation points when computing the following variables: Hmean, , Gini, CvLAD, Gapmax, Cf, Cr.
Fig 1.
Process diagram describing the modelling framework developed to link species richness and abundance with both environmental and ALS variables.
For the sake of clarity, the model presented in this diagram is a simplified shape of the real model, presented in Appendix. Analyses were carried out on the results from the second step.
Table 4.
Number of abundance and richness models corresponding to each level of significance and negligibility of ALS variables at the Lowland and Mountain sites.
Fig 2.
ΔDIC for floristic models depending on abundance and richness indicators in the Lowland and Mountain sites.
Dark horizontal lines represent the median; boxes represent the 25th and 75th percentiles; whiskers the 5th and 95th percentiles; outliers are represented by dots. The lower the ΔDIC, the more the model is improved by the ALS variable.
Fig 3.
ΔDIC for abundance and richness models depending on ALS variables in the Lowland and Mountain sites.
Dark horizontal lines represent the median; boxes represent the 25th and 75th percentiles; whiskers the 5th and 95th percentiles; outliers are represented by dots. The lower the ΔDIC, the more the model is improved by the ALS variable.
Table 5.
Number of ALS variables corresponding to each level of significance and negligibility for abundance and richness models at the Lowland and Mountain sites.
Fig 4.
Number of ALS variables which were negative non-negligible or positive non-negligible when used in floristic models.
Abundance and richness models were considered in both the Lowland and Mountain sites. The ALS variables were extracted from circular plots within the same radius as the field plots (9 m at the Lowland site and 15 m at the Mountain site), and also with radii of 50 m, 100 m and 200 m.