Lessons learnt from lecturing

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Starting the new year and hoping the pandemic would be soon over turned out to be an illusion. In many countries Instead of efficient vaccinations we had to face a series of new lockdowns and severe restrictions. New virus variants seem to promise even more of this whilst threatening and interrupting lives. Covid-19, of course,… Continue reading Lessons learnt from lecturing

Research in the time of corona

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What a time? Who would have assumed such an unprecedented global disaster? I just hope that as many readers of this blog as possible have remained unaffected by the virus and can continue now in good health. I was caught by the German lockdown in mid March when re-uniting with my family near Göttingen. Luckily… Continue reading Research in the time of corona

Weibull distribution for characterising stem-diameter structure

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The Weibull density distribution is known as [latex]f_w(dbh) = \frac{\gamma}{\beta}\left(\frac{dbh – \alpha}{\beta}\right)^{\gamma – 1} e^{-\left(\frac{dbh – \alpha}{\beta}\right)^\gamma}[/latex], where [latex]\alpha[/latex] is the location, [latex]\beta[/latex] the scale and [latex]\gamma[/latex] is the shape parameter, i.e. the parameters of the Weibull distribution are interpretable, which is always a good property of models.The cumulative distribution function, i.e. the integral of… Continue reading Weibull distribution for characterising stem-diameter structure

Visiting BOKU University in Vienna

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Long had I intended to pay BOKU University in Vienna another visit and much prevented me from carrying out this plan, too many excuses that couldn’t be ignored or so at least we often think by ourselves. To me BOKU University Vienna – officially the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna, is a… Continue reading Visiting BOKU University in Vienna

Forest biometrics – what lies ahead?

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The emancipation of forest science indeed took a long time. Forest academies starting off as teaching institutions for forestry staff more than 200 years ago carried out limited research to support state and private forest management. The spirit of this set up continued until recently with teaching that was more practical than in other fields… Continue reading Forest biometrics – what lies ahead?

Modelling size distributions

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Analysing and studying size distributions has been important to population ecology and beyond for a long time. Empirical size distributions give important clues about current size structure of a given population and often even allow conclusions about the prevailing ecological processes. Negative exponential stem-diameter distributions are, for example, often associated with forests that are exposed… Continue reading Modelling size distributions

Reconstruction of spatial woodland structure

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Reconstruction is commonly understood as the process and the result of re-establishing something that (at least partially) does not exist any longer or of re-establishing the unknown. There are a range of established reconstruction techniques for example in archaeology, in forensics (e.g. face recognition), in medicine (e.g. implants) and computing (data reconstruction). Also statistical imputation,… Continue reading Reconstruction of spatial woodland structure