The Effect of Crown Dimensions on Stem Profile for Dahurian Larch, Korean Spruce, and Manchurian Fir in Northeast China

Abstract

Crown architecture has long been evaluated for its impact on taper modeling. However, most of the research has focused on a limited number of crown dimensions. This study examined the effect of adding several crown dimensions in improving the diameter and volume estimates of Dahurian larch, Korean spruce, and Manchurian fir in northeast China. The crown dimensions included crown length, crown ratio, crown width, height to live crown base, diameter at the crown base, and crown shape. A well-known taper model of Clark et al. (1991) was fitted to the data of 276 trees from natural stands. To adjust the inherent autocorrelation in the data, we added a third-order continuous-time error structure in the model fit. Model fitting was carried out with the NLMIXED procedure (Non-linear Mixed Procedure), followed by the MODEL procedure of SAS using the generalized nonlinear least-squares method. Fit statistics and graphical assessments were used to evaluate the original and modified models. Above 98% of the total variance of d was explained by the models for all species. The addition of crown variables showed slight improvements for root mean square error (RMSE) values in the analyzed species. The RMSE plots indicated that the models with crown variables slightly improved the diameter and volume predictions for the species but only for the upper stem (>50%–90%). The study demonstrated that crown dimensions influence the stem taper, but the original model of Clark et al. (1991) reasonably realized that effect.