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Integrating UAV and Freely Available Space-Borne Data to Describe Tree Decline Across Semi-arid Mountainous Forests

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Abstract

Tree decline is a highly complex process and is inherently a function of manifold climatic, physiologic, and anthropogenic factors. Monitoring decline processes and their underlying dynamics primarily entails identifying their location and intensity across different ecosystems, for which airborne and satellite remote sensing approaches offer cost-effective and spatially explicit alternatives to field methods. Consumer-grade unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can barely be used as standalone means for large-area monitoring due to their constrains in spatial and spectral domains. However, they could effectively be integrated alongside satellite data to unlock their information for subsequent upscaling on landscape level. We designed a novel two-step workflow to describe the severity of tree decline by linking UAV-RGB information to space-borne multispectral and digital elevation model (DEM) data over 15 forest sites dominated by Persian oak across the latitudinal gradient of Zagros Forests in western Iran. We display how to 1) leverage UAV as reference data across multiple structurally different Persian oak-dominated sites in semi-arid Zagros mountains of Iran; 2) link UAV, Copernicus DEM, and Sentinel-2 data to retrieve decline information within a model-driven context; and 3) analyze the sensitivity of models by means of a global variance-based sensitivity analysis. Results suggested a high association between UAV and field data on the intensity of decline, which enabled using sampled UAV data as reference to estimate the decline severity using space-borne data by means of semi-parametric generalized additive model (GAM) and non-parametric random forest (RF) approaches. Conclusively, this study provided a baseline for multi-scale analysis of tree decline using budget and partially free data sources, which can be of high scientific and practical assets for monitoring in remote, sparse, mountainous, and continuously degrading forest areas.

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Data Availability

The associated R codes could be available via a Github repository or upon a personal reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to diverse field crews in three provinces of Kermanshah, Chaharmahal-and-Bakhtiari, and Fars who collected the field data on oak decline. We are particularly grateful for the assistance of Dr. Yaghoub Iranmanesh, Dr. Hassan Jahanbazi, Dr. Seyed Kazem Bordbar, Dr. Mehrdad Zarafshar, and Mr. Habibollah Rahimi at the provincial bureaus of the Iranian Research Institute of Forests and Rangelands (RIFR), as well as our patient driver Mr. Qarliqi and our GPS assistants Mr. Bahavar and Mr. Sabaei. This research was conducted within the Research Lab “Remote Sensing for Ecology and Ecosystem Conservation (RSEEC)” of the KNTU (Link. https://www.researchgate.net/lab/Research-Lab-Remote-Sensing-for-Ecology-and-Ecosystem-Conservation-RSEEC-Hooman-Latifi).

Funding

The UAV and GPS measurement campaigns were logistically supported by the National Zagros Forests Monitoring Project of the RIFR (project no. 01–09-09–047-97012).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, Faculty of Geodesy and Geomatics Engineering, K, N. Toosi University of Technology, P.O.Box, Tehran, 15433-19967, Iran

    Marziye Ghasemi & Hooman Latifi

  2. Department of Remote Sensing, University of Würzburg, Oswald KülpeWeg 86, 97074, Würzburg, Germany

    Hooman Latifi

  3. Agricultural Research, Education and Extension Organization (AREEO), Research Institute of Forests and Rangelands (RIFR), Tehran, Iran

    Mehdi Pourhashemi

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  1. Marziye Ghasemi
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Contributions

M.G, H.L. and M.P. designed this research and the final version of the paper. M.G. implemented the methodology and carried out the data analysis. H.L. was the main point of contact for supervision, collected the input field as well as the UAV data across all sites and partially wrote and commented the manuscript. M.P was the main point of contact regarding oak decline, partially supervised the study and wrote the manuscript. All authors have read and agreed to the submitted version of the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Hooman Latifi.

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Ghasemi, M., Latifi, H. & Pourhashemi, M. Integrating UAV and Freely Available Space-Borne Data to Describe Tree Decline Across Semi-arid Mountainous Forests. Environ Model Assess (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10666-023-09911-3

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