Book excerpt: This book presents practical information about hemispherical photography from the perspectives of field data acquisition, image processing and information retrieval methods. This book is organized into three sections. The first section describes what is hemispherical photography and what are the fundamental elements of forest structure and light interactions within the forest canopy. The second section provides practical information about the equipment, procedures and tools for procuring, processing and analyzing hemispherical photographs. Armed with this information, the third section describes several applications of hemispherical photographs to forestry and natural resource assessment. The book concludes with a discussion about modelling tools and future directions of this rapidly growing field. There is currently no information source on the market that has this comprehensive range of topics combined in a single book. The book will appeal to academics, graduate students, natural resource professionals and researchers alike.