We are interested in developing a new tool to quantify leaf herbivory, primarily by arthropods. It will work from images taken of leaves in situ. This will provide two advantages; leaves can be left in place without damaging the tree, and secondly it will allow for evaluation of damage over time.
Hi Xinfeng! Basically we've done some initial work adapting a JMP script used to identify foot lesions in elephant to quantify the proportion of a leaf that has been eaten. Some botanist colleagues told us they currently estimate insect herbivory damage to forest canopies by picking leaves and tracing the holes on graph paper. Our method might be quicker and enable leaves to be left on trees for time-series assessment.
If you're interested let's talk more about how to get good leaf images for a trial - can you email me?
Happy Chinese New Year to you too!
Zoe.
A comparison of techniques (digital images, Dirzo's index, others) it is necessary to disentangle the contribution of the new technique. It's interesting. I don't know any paper with methodological approaches to this end.
Hi everyone,
What I did was estimating a percentage of damage, then transform my measures into Dirzo's index, while keeping a record of damage for every leaf at each visit for a year (4 sites, 60 plants each site, 5 sampling seasons). This is indeed a questionable method, but it was done by the same person at all sites and sampling seasons. Your image technique should avoid subjective errors and speed up things, please let us know what is the development of it.
Cheers
To develop our idea further we need to find collaborators who are able to get leaf-damage images without removing the leaf from the tree so that damage over time can also be estimated.
I suggest write to Mariana Valoy (Tucumán, Argentina, [email protected]), María Laura Peschiutta (Córdoba, Argentina, [email protected]), Juan Carlos López Acosta (Veracruz, México, [email protected]), Juan Fornoni (México DF, [email protected])
Wow, this is a great idea.
It would be so amazing to be able to photograph a leaf and easily quantify insect damaged area like this.
Have you made any progress? I have a student working on a small project on leaf herbivory who will need an easy method.
Hey Scott! We have pretty much all the software in place now. I guess the main question is how to sample the leaves. Traditionally this seems to be done by removing them from the tree and analysing damage ex situ. However, if we could image them on the tree we'd be able to do time-series analyses which would be more informative on several fronts. We need to devise something like a little perspex holder with a scale that a leaf could be flattened on and photographed. Tree climbing equpiment would be essential too. We're also working with Yubo Zhang in Stuart's group on canopy images to estimate forest biomass - this could be tied in. Our main problem is time. If you find someone interested in this we're happy to help supervise.
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- Biological Science
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