Validation of North American Forest Disturbance dynamics derived from Landsat time series stacks

The North American Forest Dynamics (NAFD) study is a core project of the North American Carbon Program (NACP). The NAFD project is evaluating forest disturbance patterns and rates of disturbance by integrating U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Forest Service Inventory and Analysis (FIA) field ob...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:	Remote sensing of environment Vol. 115; no. 1; pp. 19 - 32
Main Authors:	Thomas, Nancy E., Huang, Chengquan, Goward, Samuel N., Powell, Scott, Rishmawi, Khaldoun, Schleeweis, Karen, Hinds, Adrienne
Format:	Journal Article
Language:	English
Published:	New York, NY Elsevier Inc 17-01-2011 Elsevier
Subjects:	Accuracy assessment Animal, plant and microbial ecology Applied geophysics Biological and medical sciences carbon cartography data collection Disturbances Dynamics Earth sciences Earth, ocean, space environmental degradation Exact sciences and technology Forest disturbance Forests Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology General aspects. Techniques image analysis Internal geophysics inventories Landsat Landsat time series stacks (LTSS) North American Forest Disturbance (NAFD) remote sensing Stacks Stands Supports Teledetection and vegetation maps Time series time series analysis USDA Vegetation change tracker (VCT) United States North America USA North American Forest Disturbance (NAFD) Vegetation change tracker (VCT) Accuracy assessment Landsat time series stacks (LTSS) Forest disturbance Time series projects data accuracy History inventory North America evaluation drill cores 2005 carbon imagery Validation Dynamic characteristic maps Space remote sensing Landsat utilization Vegetation dynamics Perturbation analysis forests samples Landsat satellite programs Field study
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Summary:	The North American Forest Dynamics (NAFD) study is a core project of the North American Carbon Program (NACP). The NAFD project is evaluating forest disturbance patterns and rates of disturbance by integrating U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Forest Service Inventory and Analysis (FIA) field observations with temporally dense time series Landsat imagery. In Phase I of NAFD forest disturbance history was derived for 23 U.S. sample locations over the time period 1984 to 2005 from biennial Landsat time series stacks (LTSS). This study evaluates the accuracy of these Phase I NAFD disturbance history maps for 6 selected sample locations. We evaluate the disturbance maps using 2 reference datasets: 1) a design-based approach incorporating visual analysis of the LTSS in tandem with high resolution imagery and 2) the USDA FIA field observations. Overall accuracy for the NAFD disturbance product assessed at the individual time step level range from 77% to 86%. We examine the success rates of the mapping approach for capturing different types of disturbance and find that 82% of stand clearing events were detected. When we aggregate the data into change and no change categories the accuracy of stand clearing disturbance samples improved to over 92%. The majority of error in the disturbance maps was due to misclassification of partial disturbance as unchanged forest. We analyze the resulting errors of commission and omission as related to both reference datasets for each LTSS and present examples to illustrate the strengths and weaknesses of Phase I NAFD approach. In addition, we discuss the map biases observed in this work and what this may imply for estimating national forest disturbance rates with this approach.
Bibliography:	http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.rse.2010.07.009 ObjectType-Article-1 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-2 content type line 23
ISSN:	0034-4257 1879-0704
DOI:	10.1016/j.rse.2010.07.009