Throughfall Patterns and Canopy Cover Indices in a Highly Heterogeneous Forest

Abstract

While rainfall interception controls how much water will be ultimately available for many ecological functions, it is not well understood how canopy structure controls the spatial and temporal distribution of throughfall inside forests. Specially in subtropical and highly heterogenous forests, such as the Atlantic Forest in Brazil, rainfall interception has been only timidly studied. In this paper we investigated how the spatial and temporal variations of throughfall are controlled by the canopy structure. Throughfall spatial variability was measured for a period of over a year using 28 throughfall gauges uniformly distributed in a 28 m² Atlantic Forest plot in Southern Brazil. We proposed the use of the number of overlapping crowns (NOC)