Author: Arne Pommerening

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

Species diversity, a combination of species richness and relative abundance (Newton, 2007), is not the only aspect of biodiversity, but a rather important and the most commonly considered one (Kimmins, 2004). In the past, most importance has been assigned to species diversity and there is a wide range of approaches to quantifying this aspect of… Continue reading Quantifying non-spatial species diversity

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

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

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

How is it to write a textbook? That was the question I was wondering about when approaching my forties. A colleague once mentioned to me, his mentor had told him that forty years of age is the magic threshold when researchers really begin to see the holistic picture of their research as if standing on… Continue reading Individual-based methods in forest ecology and management

What does it mean? In many plant modelling applications growth processes are modelled in such a way that maximum growth or the growth of dominant plants is reduced by mitigating agents such as the interaction with other plants and factors of the physical environment such as light, water, temperature and nutrients. Dominant plants can for… Continue reading Potential growth and quantile regression

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?

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 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