Tree taper modelling with stochastic differential equation

Abstract

This paper introduces the application of stochastic differential equations for the tree taper modelling. We propose to model taper curves using stochastic differential equations that are deduced from the standard deterministic growth function by adding random variations to the growth dynamics. It is assumed that the conditional distribution of the taper diffusion process has an explicit form. We illustrate the efficiency of our method using the Gompertz and Vasicek diffusion processes to model data on Scots pine trees. The results are implemented in the symbolic computational language MAPLE