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Change in Vegetation Patterns Over a Large Forested Landscape Based on Historical and Contemporary Aerial Photography

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Abstract

Changes to vegetation structure and composition in forests adapted to frequent fire have been well documented. However, little is known about changes to the spatial characteristics of vegetation in these forests. Specifically, patch sizes and detailed information linking vegetation type to specific locations and growing conditions on the landscape are lacking. We used historical and recent aerial imagery to characterize historical vegetation patterns and assess contemporary change from those patterns. We created an orthorectified mosaic of aerial photographs from 1941 covering approximately 100,000 ha in the northern Sierra Nevada. The historical imagery, along with contemporary aerial imagery from 2005, was segmented into homogenous vegetation patches and classified into four relative cover classes using random forests analysis. A generalized linear mixed model was used to compare topographic associations of dense forest cover on the historical and contemporary landscapes. The amount of dense forest cover increased from 30 to 43% from 1941 to 2005, replacing moderate forest cover as the most dominant class. Concurrent with the increase in extent, the area-weighted mean patch size of dense forest cover increased tenfold, indicating greater continuity of dense forest cover and more homogenous vegetation patterns across the contemporary landscape. Historically, dense forest cover was rare on southwesterly aspects, but in the contemporary forest, it was common across a broad range of aspects. Despite the challenges of processing historical air photographs, the unique information they provide on landscape vegetation patterns makes them a valuable source of reference information for forests impacted by past management practices.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the USFS Region 5 Remote Sensing Lab for lending advice and computing resources to help with air photograph processing, particularly Nathan Amboy, Tanya Kohler, Stacey Mikulovsky, and Carlos Ramirez. We thank Nels Johnson at the Pacific Southwest Research Station for help with statistical analysis. We thank Mike Constandy with Westmoreland Research for digitizing all of the historical aerial photographs from the original film stored in the NARA office, College Park, Maryland. Critique and comments from Jefferey Hicke (as subject-matter editor) and two anonymous reviewers improved the clarity and quality of the manuscript. This work was funded by the FY14 Moonlight Fire Restoration Program, project #50 RIRI.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. USDA Forest Service, Pacific Southwest Research Station, 1731 Research Park Dr, Davis, California, 95618, USA

    Jamie M. Lydersen

  2. Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, California, USA

    Jamie M. Lydersen

  3. Center for Fire Research and Outreach, University of California, Berkeley, 137 Mulford Hall, Berkeley, California, 94720, USA

    Brandon M. Collins

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  1. Jamie M. Lydersen
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Correspondence to Jamie M. Lydersen.

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JL designed the study, performed research, analyzed data, and wrote the paper. BC conceived and designed the study and wrote the paper.

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Lydersen, J.M., Collins, B.M. Change in Vegetation Patterns Over a Large Forested Landscape Based on Historical and Contemporary Aerial Photography. Ecosystems 21, 1348–1363 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10021-018-0225-5

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