Estimating light environment in forests with a new thresholding method for hemispherical photography

Light environment estimates derived from hemispherical photography are known to be affected by variations in sky illumination. During photo acquisition, rapid changes in sky illumination can occur and will result in changes in detected canopy gap size and frequency. Any resulting problems in image consistency will become more serious with increased time lags between setting the reference exposure and hemispherical photograph acquisition. We showed that if the camera exposure setting was kept constant during photo acquisition, the estimated diffuse transmittance would be greatly influenced by sky illumination change. We developed a new pixel thresholding method that calculated the optimal threshold value for the separation of sky and plant pixels as a function of the above-canopy photosynthetic photon flux density (PPFD). We tested the performance of our method for estimating transmittance against two established methods that assume exposure to be held constant to two stops higher than the reference exposure. Our method compensates for changes in sky illumination, producing a smaller pixel threshold value when sky illumination decreases and a larger pixel threshold value when photographs are taken under increased sky illumination. The new method achieved accurate and reproducible results, even in situations where under-or over-exposure was caused by changes in sky illumination during photo acquisition.