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United States Forest Disturbance Trends Observed Using Landsat Time Series

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Abstract

Disturbance events strongly affect the composition, structure, and function of forest ecosystems; however, existing US land management inventories were not designed to monitor disturbance. To begin addressing this gap, the North American Forest Dynamics (NAFD) project has examined a geographic sample of 50 Landsat satellite image time series to assess trends in forest disturbance across the conterminous United States for 1985–2005. The geographic sample design used a probability-based scheme to encompass major forest types and maximize geographic dispersion. For each sample location disturbance was identified in the Landsat series using the Vegetation Change Tracker (VCT) algorithm. The NAFD analysis indicates that, on average, 2.77 Mha y−1 of forests were disturbed annually, representing 1.09% y−1 of US forestland. These satellite-based national disturbance rates estimates tend to be lower than those derived from land management inventories, reflecting both methodological and definitional differences. In particular, the VCT approach used with a biennial time step has limited sensitivity to low-intensity disturbances. Unlike prior satellite studies, our biennial forest disturbance rates vary by nearly a factor of two between high and low years. High western US disturbance rates were associated with active fire years and insect activity, whereas variability in the east is more strongly related to harvest rates in managed forests. We note that generating a geographic sample based on representing forest type and variability may be problematic because the spatial pattern of disturbance does not necessarily correlate with forest type. We also find that the prevalence of diffuse, non-stand-clearing disturbance in US forests makes the application of a biennial geographic sample problematic. Future satellite-based studies of disturbance at regional and national scales should focus on wall-to-wall analyses with annual time step for improved accuracy.

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Notes

  1. In this article, we use the term “scene” to refer to the nominal geographic area of a particular Landsat Worldwide Reference System (WRS-2 path/row). The actual Landsat acquisitions from specific dates for that area are termed “images” (see Strahler and others 1986).

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Acknowledgments

This study was supported by the NASA Terrestrial Ecology and Applied Sciences Programs and the US Forest Service (NASA Grants NNG05GE55 and NNX08AI26G for Goward, Huang, and Schleeweis; Interagency Agreement NNH11AR291 for Cohen). John Dwyer (USGS) is thanked for facilitating data access and addressing questions related to Landsat data quality. Eric Vermote (University of Maryland) and Greg Ederer (NASA GSFC) provided support for the Landsat preprocessing and atmospheric correction.

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Author notes

  1. Robert E. Kennedy

    Present address: Department of Earth and Environment, Boston University, 685 Commonwealth Ave, Boston, Massachusetts, 02215, USA

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Biospheric Sciences Laboratory (Code 618), NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland, 20771, USA

    Jeffrey G. Masek

  2. Department of Geographical Sciences, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, 20742, USA

    Samuel N. Goward, Karen Schleeweis & Chengquan Huang

  3. Department of Forest Science, Oregon State University, Corvallis, Oregon, USA

    Robert E. Kennedy

  4. Pacific Northwest Research Station, USDA Forest Service, 3200 SW Jefferson Way, Corvallis, Oregon, 97331, USA

    Warren B. Cohen

  5. Rocky Mountain Research Station, USDA Forest Service, 4746 S. 1900 E, Ogden, Utah, 84403, USA

    Gretchen G. Moisen

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  1. Jeffrey G. Masek
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Correspondence to Jeffrey G. Masek.

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Author Contributions

SG conceived study; JM, SG, WC, GM, and RK analyzed data and wrote the article. KS and CH analyzed data and developed methods.

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Masek, J.G., Goward, S.N., Kennedy, R.E. et al. United States Forest Disturbance Trends Observed Using Landsat Time Series. Ecosystems 16, 1087–1104 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10021-013-9669-9

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