The Holland Scientific Crop Circle Phenom represents a new remote sensing tool for measuring the radiative transfer and biophysical characters of plant canopies.
Leaf Area Index (LAI) is the ratio of foliage area to ground area. The LAI-2200 computes LAI from measurements made above the canopy and below the canopy, which are used to determine canopy light interception at 5 angles. These data are fit to a well-established model of radiative transfer inside vegetative canopies to compute leaf area index, mean tilt angle, and canopy gap fraction.
The benefits of the LAI-2200 over other methods such as ceptometry and hemispherical photography are that it: