Speaker
Description
The Forest Condition Monitor project of the Helmholtz-Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) aims at making information about national scale forest condition accessible to stakeholders, policy makers and scientists. One of its main components is an area-wide estimation of forest condition anomalies from satellite-based land-surface reflectance measurements. Reflectance patterns differ between healthy and damaged vegetation and are widely used to depict vegetation vitality or anomalies. Here, we used a tree species map with 10 m spatial resolution to extract species-specific reflectance time series of Germany's tree stands for 2016-2022. The seasonal evolution of these time series serves as reference for the detection of forest condition anomalies. We calculated a similarity metric – further called forest condition anomaly index (FCA) - between each reflectance observation and the respective measurements within the reference time series, also considering the natural temporal deviations caused by phenology. A temporal aggregation of these FCA values allows the generation of a spatially comprehensive map with 20 m spatial resolution, showing patterns related to drought, fire, storm events and bark beetle outbreaks. We compared this map with the Shannon index derived from tree species information to assess potential links between biodiversity and forest disturbances. Here, we present the FCA's ability to depict forest condition and first results about its relation to biodiversity.
| Status Group | Postdoctoral Researcher |
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