Understanding Forest Health with Remote Sensing -Part I—A Review of Spectral Traits, Processes and Remote-Sensing Characteristics <s> 4. <s> Conceptually, plant functional types represent a classification scheme between species and broad vegetation types. Historically, these were based on physiological, structural and/or phenological properties, whereas recently, they have reflected plant responses to resources or environmental conditions. Often, an underlying assumption, based on an economic analogy, is that the functional role of vegetation can be identified by linked sets of morphological and physiological traits constrained by resources, based on the hypothesis of functional convergence. Using these concepts, ecologists have defined a variety of functional traits that are often context dependent, and the diversity of proposed traits demonstrates the lack of agreement on universal categories. Historically, remotely sensed data have been interpreted in ways that parallel these observations, often focused on the categorization of vegetation into discrete types, often dependent on the sampling scale. At the same time, current thinking in both ecology and remote sensing has moved towards viewing vegetation as a continuum rather than as discrete classes. The capabilities of new remote sensing instruments have led us to propose a new concept of optically distinguishable functional types ('optical types') as a unique way to address the scale dependence of this problem. This would ensure more direct relationships between ecological information and remote sensing observations. <s> BIB001 </s> Understanding Forest Health with Remote Sensing -Part I—A Review of Spectral Traits, Processes and Remote-Sensing Characteristics <s> 4. <s> A B S T R A C T Plant trait data have been used in various studies related to ecosystem functioning, community ecology, and assessment of ecosystem services. Evidences are that plant scientists agree on a set of key plant traits, which are relatively easy to measure and have a stable and strong predictive response to ecosystem functions. However, the field measurements of plant trait data are still limited to small area, to a certain moment in time and to certain number of species only. Therefore, remote sensing (RS) offers potential to complement or even replace field measurements of some plant traits. It offers instantaneous spatially contiguous information, covers larger areas and in case of satellite observations profits from their revisit capacity. In this review, we first introduce RS concepts of light–vegetation interactions, RS instruments for vegetation studies, RS methods, and scaling between field and RS observations. Further we discuss in detail current achievements and challenges of optical RS for mapping of key plant traits. We concentrate our discussion on three categorical plant traits (plant growth and life forms, flammability properties and photosynthetic pathways and activity) and on five continuous plant traits (plant height, leaf phenology, leaf mass per area, nitrogen and phosphorous concentration or content). We review existing literature to determine the retrieval accuracy of the continuous plant traits. The relative estimation error using RS ranged between 10% and 45% of measured mean value, i.e. around 10% for plant height of tall canopies, 20% for plant height of short canopies, 15% for plant nitrogen, 25% for plant phosphorus content/ concentration, and 45% for leaf mass per area estimates. <s> BIB002
RS is a physically-based system that can only directly or indirectly record the spectral traits and spectral trait variations in plants, communities or biomes BIB001 BIB002 (Figure 4 ).