Canopée

The canopée indicates the upper floor of the Forêt, in direct contact with the free atmosphere. She is sometimes regarded as a habitat or an ecosystem as such, in particular in Tropical forest where she is particularly rich in term of Biodiversité and of biological productivity.

etymology and history of the word and the concept

The word is a translation of English canopy , itself borrowed from the vocabulary of furnishing: it is the canopy or Baldaquin. Of recent invention, the word canopée was essential within the framework of the ecological study of the wet tropical forests, when the researchers engaged of the specific means to explore them. Canopée proved to constitute a particular habitat for many species, and to be a zone of intense biological actvity and biochemical.

Medium and habitat

Generally located at several tens of meters height, canopée the form a higher layer of a few meters thickness where is more than 80% of the foliage of the Arbre S. It is there that the majority of the solar energy is collected (more than 95%) and that 30% of the Précipitation S are absorbed by the foliage. One also finds there a fauna abundant and particular. Forwardings of Francis Market and others showed that the plants synthesize there much more complex molecules than on the level of the ground or the shade of the trees. It is a new field of research for the Pharmacopée and the comprehension of forest ecology. At the technical origin term used for the tropical forests, the word canopée tends to being used for all the kinds of forests and to even indicate the floating part of the marine formations of Algue S giants (or Kelp). It supplants the term of forest vault which lets suppose a position on the ground of the observer.

Exploration by Plane, Helicopter or even in ULM allows only one short overflight of canopée. This is why currently several projects of bio-zoological exploration are spread in this medium still badly known, because of its relative inaccessibility. Among the means of exploration, in addition to a using project of the cranes, or traditional exploration by the climbing ones with adapted means of the climbing, one can quote the use of several types of airships:

the ACE 300 , an airship transporting the Raft of the summits;
the Bubble of the summits, a balloon with single-seat helium moving along a cord installed on canopée;
the Arboglisseur , Rozière motorized which can transport two scientists in addition to the pilot.

canopé is characterized by a maximum sunning and a very particular microclimate. The temperature that one records there are strongly influenced by its color and the evapotranspiration and by the foliar biomass in activity (of the infra-red photographs of edges of coniferous trees normally furnished with their needles or défoliés by insects a very important difference in temperature between these two situations shows)

Another direction

“" Canopée " ” is also the name of the project of Patrick Berger and Jacques Anziutti adopted, on June 29th, 2007, to replace the current district of the Halles of Paris.

Exploration

See too

Francis Market

External bonds

Internet site of association '' Radeau of the aerostatic summits ''
tools '' Dany Cleyet-Marrel ''
dendronautics.org

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