Research Article | OPEN ACCESS
Height-diameter Models of Chinese Fir (Cunninghamia lanceolata) Based on Nonlinear Mixed Effects Models in Southeast China
Hao Xu, Yujun Sun, Xinjie Wang and Ying Li
Key Laboratory for Silviculture and Conservation of Ministry of Education, Beijing Forestry University, Beijing, China
Advance Journal of Food Science and Technology 2014 4:445-452
Received: November 04, 2013 | Accepted: November 13, 2013 | Published: April 10, 2014
Abstract
Tree height and diameter at breast height are two important forest factors. The best model from 23 height-diameter equations was selected as the basic model to fit the height-diameter relationships of Chinese fir with one level (sites or plots effects) and nested two levels (nested effects of sites and plots) Nonlinear Mixed Effects (NLME) models. The best model was chosen by smaller Bias, RMSE and larger R2adj. Then the best random-effects combinations for the NLME models were determined by AIC, BIC and -2LL. The results showed that the basic model with three random effects parameters φ1, φ2 and φ3 was considered the best mixed model. The nested two levels NLME model considering heteroscedasticity structure (power function) possessed with higher predictable accuracy and significantly improved model performance (LRT = 469.43, p<0.0001). The NLME model would be allowed for estimating accuracy the height-diameter relationships of Chinese fir and provided better height predictions than the models using only fixed-effects parameters.
Keywords:
Cunninghamia lanceolata, height-diameter models, heteroscedasticity, nonlinear mixed effects models,
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Competing interests
The authors have no competing interests.
Open Access Policy
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
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The authors have no competing interests.
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