Modelling forest dynamics: a perspective from point process methods

This paper reviews the main applications of (marked) point process theory in forestry including functions to analyse spatial variability and the main (marked) point process models. Although correlation functions do describe spatial variability at distinct range of scale, they are clearly restricted to the analysis of few dominant species since they are based on pairwise analysis. This has over-simplified the spatial analysis of complex forest dynamics involving "large" number of species. Moreover, although process models can reproduce, to some extent, real forest spatial patterns of trees, the biological forest-ecological interpretation of the resulting spatial structures is difficult since these models usually lack of biological realism. This problem gains in strength as usually most of these point process models are defined in terms of purely spatial relationships, though in real life, forest develop through time. We thus aim to discuss the applicability of such formulations to analyse and simulate "real" forest dynamics and unwrap their shortcomes. We present a unified approach of modern spatially explicit forest growth models. Finally, we focus on a continuous space-time stochastic process as an alternative approach to generate marked point patterns evolving through space and time.