251 – Ecology and Vegetation Monitoring
When Should a Tree Be Harvested?
Sponsor: Section on Statistics and the Environment
Keywords: stochastic differential equation, tree, growth rings, maximum process
Anders Muszta
Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
We propose a model for growth rings of a single tree, resting on two premises: the ring diameter is bounded and increases. A simple way of satisfying these premises is to model the diameter as the running maximum of a bounded stochastic differential equation. If we require the stochastic differential equation to be reducible, then we obtain a bijective map of the diameter dynamics to the dynamics of a one-dimensional Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process. This strictly monotone map allows for a law of the iterated logarithm to be obtained, which can assist in deciding when the tree should be harvested.
