Development of Landsat-based annual US forest disturbance history maps (1986–2010) in support of the North American Carbon Program (NACP)

Development of Landsat-based annual US forest disturbance history maps (1986–2010) in support of the North American Carbon Program (NACP)

In Phase III of the North American Forest Dynamics (NAFD) study an automatic workflow has been developed for evaluating forest disturbance history using Landsat observations. It has four major components: an automated approach for image selection and preprocessing, the vegetation change tracker (VCT...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Remote sensing of environment Vol. 209; pp. 312 - 326
Main Authors: Zhao, Feng, Huang, Chengquan, Goward, Samuel N., Schleeweis, Karen, Rishmawi, Khaldoun, Lindsey, Mary A., Denning, Elaine, Keddell, Louis, Cohen, Warren B., Yang, Zhiqiang, Dungan, Jennifer L., Michaelis, Andrew
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: New York Elsevier Inc 01-05-2018
Elsevier BV
Subjects:
Archives & records
Automation
Cloud computing
CONUS
Disturbance
Environmental protection
Forest disturbance
Forest ecosystems
Forest management
Forests
Landsat
Landsat satellites
NAFD-NEX
Remote sensing
Research facilities
Sampling methods
Satellite imagery
Satellite observation
Spatial distribution
VCT
Workflow
United States > US
NAFD-NEX
CONUS
VCT
Forest disturbance
Landsat
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Summary:In Phase III of the North American Forest Dynamics (NAFD) study an automatic workflow has been developed for evaluating forest disturbance history using Landsat observations. It has four major components: an automated approach for image selection and preprocessing, the vegetation change tracker (VCT) forest disturbance analysis, postprocessing, and validation. This approach has been applied to the conterminous US (CONUS) to produce a comprehensive analysis of US forest disturbance history using the NASA Earth Exchange (NEX) cloud computing system. The resultant NAFD-NEX product includes 25 annual forest disturbance maps for 1986–2010 and two time-integrated maps to provide spatial-temporal synoptic view of disturbances over this time period. These maps were derived based on 24,000+ scenes selected from 350,000+ available Landsat images at 30-m resolution, and were validated using a visual assessment of Landsat time-series images in combination with high-resolution and other ancillary data sources over samples selected using a probability based sampling method. The validation revealed no major biases in the NAFD-NEX maps for disturbance events that resulted in at least 20% canopy cover loss. The average user's and producer's accuracies for the disturbance class were 53.6% and 53.3%, respectively, with the individual year's user's accuracy varying from 42.8% to 73.6% and producer's accuracy from 39.0% to 84.8% over the 25-year period. The NAFD-NEX disturbance maps are available from a web portal of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory Distributed Active Archive Center (ORNL-DAAC) at https://doi.org/10.3334/ORNLDAAC/1290. •A workflow was developed for mapping US forest disturbance history using Landsat.•It was used to generate annual 30-m disturbance maps for CONUS from 1986 to 2010.•These maps represent disturbances that resulted in ≥20% canopy cover change.•They are available from https://daac.ornl.gov/cgi-bin/dsviewer.pl?ds_id=1290.
ISSN:0034-4257
1879-0704
DOI:10.1016/j.rse.2018.02.035