Methods to Access the Canopy Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Methods to Access the Canopy - Essay Example The original method of technical climbing hardware to trees adopted by biologists began in the 1970s. Canopy access using ropes, although independently evolved across the globe, eventually appeared side-by-side in the journal Biotropica, when Perry's colleague published her Costa Rica work in the same issue as Lowman's first Australian data set (Lowman 1984; Nadkarni 1984). Single Rope Techniques (SRT) is portable and relatively inexpensive method of canopy study which allowed canopy access even to graduate students with their modest budgets. However the limitation of SRT is such that it was not useful for emergent trees whose enormous canopies usually extended far away from the main trunk itself. To access foliage on the extremities, another invention known as the canopy boom (a horizontal bar with a bosun's chair at one end that swung into the leafy canopy away from the main trunk) was created by Peter Ashton and colleagues. Later on, with the development of more modern technology, construction crane was first set up by Alan Smith of Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) to study forest canopies in Panama. Although relatively expensive, this device allowed access to any region of canopy beneath the crane arm without regard to the tree trunk. Methods are further expanded to using hot-air balloon and raft operation, called Radeau des Cimes (translation: raft on the rooftop of the world) which was designed by