Järvselja Pine Stand (Summer): HET07_JPS_SUM
This page provides descriptions of the architectural, spectral and illumination related properties of a 124 year old Pinus sylvestris stand located at 58° 18′ 47.13″ N 27° 17′ 48.23″ E, The stand was inventoried in the summer 2007 by Andres Kuusk, Joel Kuusk, Mait Lang, Tõnu Lükk, Matti Mõttus, Tiit Nilson, Miina Rautiainen, and Alo Eenmäe of the Tartu Observatory, in Tõravere, Estonia as well as the Estonian University of Life Sciences, Tartu, Estonia. Potential RAMI participants thus are to treat the information presented on this page as actual 'inventory data', that is, they should identify/extract those parameters and characteristics that are required as input to their canopy reflectance models. In some cases this may mean that simplifications have to be made to the available information, or, that parts of the available information cannot be - or have to be modified before being - exploited with a given radiative transfer model. Whatever the case may be, all potential RAMI participants should mimic the standard practices that they use when matching actual field measurements to the required set(s) of input parameters for their model(s). If this means that you need more information than provided, please do not hesitate in contacting us. Last but not least, for those 3D models capable of maintaining architectural fidelity down to the individual shoot and branch level a series of ASCII (text) files containing the Cartesian coordinates of various geometric primitives (triangles, spheres and cylinders) and their transformations will be given.
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In order to facilitate the generation of the Järvselja Scots Pine (Summer) forest the information on this page has been subdivided into four different categories. For each one of these categories the relevant descriptions will be contained within a uniquely coloured text frame and can be accessed by clicking on one of the four links below:
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In case of difficulties or missing data on this page please do not hesitate in contacting us so that the problems may be resolved as fast as possible.
Architectural information 
1) General canopy characteristicsThe Järvselja Scots Pine forest inventory was carried out over a 100×100 m² area placing the origin of the coordinate system at its south-western end. In order to include also the tree crowns of the inventoried tree locations within the RAMI Scots Pine Summer stand representation it was necessary to expand the scene area slightly beyond one hectare. Maintaining the origin of the tree location coordinate system thus resulted in some negative x,y values in the table below. Overall architectural characteristics of the scene are thus as follows:
**The fractional cover is defined as 1 - direct transmission at zero solar zenith angle. 2) Foliage structureThe table below provides the structural characteristics of the Scots Pine shoots (left) and the birch leaves (right). Individual shoots of the Scots Pine trees are generated in using most of the properties presented in Table 1 of Smolander et al., 2003 (RSE). The shape of individual birch tree leaves is approximated from photographs as depicted in the right hand picture. RT models capable of representing the architecture of individual foliage elements with a series of geometric primitives (triangle, sphere, cylinder) may want to use the information provided in the ASCII (text) files accessible from the last row in each table below.
the link in the last row of the above left-side table). If individual needles are represented as cylinders (with discs as endcaps) then the total needle area of the shoot is 159.03 cm². The number of shoots per pine tree should be adjusted accordingly. 3) Tree structureThe Järvselja Scots Pine forest is generated on the basis of 11 individual tree representations. Ten of these pertain to the Scots pine (Pinus Sylvestris) species and one refers to Birch (Betula Pendula). The table below provides an overview of some structural characteristics of these 11 tree representations. For those RT models capable of representing the 3D architecture of a given tree through a series of geometric primitives the last lines of this table contain links to data files with detailed specifications of the foliage and wood structural properties of the Järvselja Scots Pine forest (summer) trees.
4) Stand structureThe Järvselja Scots Pine forest is composed of 1120 individual trees. The following table indicates how these trees are distributed among the above tree classes and specifies their respective x,y locations of the tree centers of each tree class in the forest stand. The last row of this table contains an ASCII file with tree rotation and translation information for those RT models capable of ingesting the detailed 3D architecture of the tree models specified in the previous section.
![]() Tree species and locations for the Järvselja Scots pine (summer) stand. The origin of the coordinate system is in the lower left hand side corner of the image. RAMI participants with 3D RT models capable of representing objects using geometric primitives can download a single compressed ZIP archive with all the tree architectural ASCII information that is listed in the above tables by clicking HERE. Note: The size of the compressed archive is about 9.3 megabytes. It contains 46 ASCII files and can be unzipped using 'WINZIP' on windows or 'unzip' on linux/unix operating systems. Beware that the inflated archive will take up 65.9 Megabytes of storage. |
spectral canopy characteristics 
All of the foliage wood and background components in the Järvselja pinestand (summer) scene feature LAMBERTIAN scattering properties. The tables below contains the magnitudes of the reflectance and transmission characteristics of the various canopy components for nineteen different spectral bands. The experimental identifier for the Järvselja Pine Stand (Summer) scene is given by HET07_JPS_SUM_B**_36 where B** relates to the spectral bands (B01, B02, …, B19). An ASCII (text) file that resumes all of this information can be found here.
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illumination characteristics 
The illumination conditions for the Järvselja Scots Pine forest stand relate to the 10th June 2005 at GMT 9:42-9:44. More specifically illumination contains both a direct and an isotropic diffuse component. The direct solar illumination is characterised by a solar zenith angle (SZA) of 36.6 degree and a solar azimuth angle of 299.06 degree. The table below indicates the ratio of isotropic diffuse to total incident radiation for the nineteen different spectral bands:
The figure below shows a perspective-free view of the Järvselja Scots pine stand with the Cartesian coordinate
system and the direction of the incident solar radiation (blue arrow) superimposed. Azimuth
angles are counted in an anti-clockwise direction from the positive X-axis towards the positive Y-axis
as indicated by the (dotted blue) arc around the origin. ![]() |
measurement characteristics 
Prior to the performing of any RT model simulations, please refer to the 'definitions' pages for detailed instructions regarding the angular sign conventions for BRF simulations, as well as other RT model technicalities. Also read the relevant file naming and formatting conventions that must be adhered to by all participants. In addition, RAMI-IV offers participants the possibility to test the compliance of their model-generated results files with these file-naming and formatting convention, prior to their submission via ftp: To do so follow the on-line format checker link that appears in the top navigation bar during the active submission period.