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Assessing foliar chlorophyll contents with the SPAD-502 chlorophyll meter: a calibration test with thirteen tree species of tropical rainforest in French Guiana

Annals of Forest Science volume 67, page 607 (2010)Cite this article

Abstract

  • • Chlorophyll meters such as the SPAD-502 offer a simple, inexpensive and rapid method to estimate foliar chlorophyll content. However, values provided by SPAD-502 are unitless and require empirical calibrations between SPAD units and extracted chlorophyll values.

  • • Leaves of 13 tree species from the tropical rain forest in French Guiana were sampled to select the most appropriate calibration model among the often-used linear, polynomial and exponential models, in addition to a novel homographic model that has a natural asymptote.

  • • The homographic model best accurately predicted total chlorophyll content (μg cm−2) from SPAD units (R 2 = 0.89). Interspecific differences in the homographic model parameters explain less than 7% of the variation in chlorophyll content in our data set.

  • • The utility of the general homographic model for a variety of research and management applications clearly outweighs the slight loss of model accuracy due to the abandon of the species’ effect.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Unité Mixte de Recherche Écologie des Forêts de Guyane, INRA, Kourou, France

    Sabrina Coste, Christopher Baraloto, Jean-Christophe Roggy & Heidy Schimann

  2. Unité Mixte de Recherche Écologie des Forêts de Guyane, CNRS, Kourou, France

    Céline Leroy

  3. Unité Mixte de Recherche Écologie des Forêts de Guyane, AgroParisTech-ENGREF, Kourou, France

    Éric Marcon & Amélie Renaud

  4. Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University Herbaria, Harvard University, 22 Divinity Avenue, 02138, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Andrew D. Richardson

  5. Department of Plant and Environmental Sciences, University of Gothenburg, Göteborg, Sweden

    Johan Uddling

  6. Unité Mixte de Recherche Ecologie des Forêts de Guyane, Université des Antilles et de la Guyane, Kourou, France

    Bruno Hérault

Authors
  1. Sabrina Coste
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  2. Christopher Baraloto
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  3. Céline Leroy
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  4. Éric Marcon
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  5. Amélie Renaud
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  6. Andrew D. Richardson
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  7. Jean-Christophe Roggy
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  8. Heidy Schimann
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  9. Johan Uddling
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  10. Bruno Hérault
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Correspondence to Bruno Hérault.

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Coste, S., Baraloto, C., Leroy, C. et al. Assessing foliar chlorophyll contents with the SPAD-502 chlorophyll meter: a calibration test with thirteen tree species of tropical rainforest in French Guiana. Ann. For. Sci. 67, 607 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1051/forest/2010020

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1051/forest/2010020

Keywords

  • chlorophyll estimate
  • model calibration
  • homographic functions
  • neotropical trees

Annals of Forest Science

ISSN: 1297-966X