On calculating bark widths separately for later processing

[Lars-Ake]

Got this:

Hi Lars-Ake,

I have a problem with some .pos files that I have created, and I wondered if you would be able to give me some advice. I have a dataset of approximately 3600 cores, which I wanted to analyse using basal area increment. I measured the cores, and I have created chronologies using CDendro. One thing occurred to me though – when using ring widths and stem diameter to calculate basal area increment, I should take into account the thickness of the bark. So, I went back to my cores and used CooRecorder to measure the bark, as a separate series of .pos files. I thought I could then import them into CDendro, and create a .rwl file, thus giving me the bark measurements in a format that I could then look at in R. My problem is that the each bark file is a very short series, and that CDendro doesn’t seem to like dealing with .pos files which consist of just a few coordinates. ...

I’m aware that I am sort of abusing the programme – i.e. trying to make it do something that it was not designed for. However, do you know of any way that I can use my bark measurements? Essentially what I want is to get a sum length of measurements for each .pos file. Your webpage says that you use CooRecorder for measurements on bees, so I’m hoping that you have a way of using measurements that are not annual ring series.

To clarify:

Each original .pos file referred to an image with 2 cores from one single tree.
Therefore, each .pos file consists of a short series of widths covering 2 pieces of bark from 2 cores from the same tree.
The "more than one point per line" data picking mode was used to jump from one core’s bark to the next, and crack marker used to deal with broken/fragmented bark.
I need a sum of all widths in each .pos file.

Best wishes,
Liam Cavin

I have now written a small program that is able to read in all Liam's .pos files and then produce a tab-delimited list of filenames containing also the sum of the bark widths for each file. This list can be imported into e.g. MS Excel.
The program is available at the last point under the heading "Methodology" at http://www.cybis.se/forfun/dendro. Here is a direct link: http://www.cybis.se/forfun/dendro/CalcW ... /index.htm
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