Early-wilted forest following the Central European 2018 extreme drought

During the summer of 2018, Central Europe experienced the most extreme drought and heat wave on record, leading to widespread early leaf-shedding and die-offs in forest trees. We quantified such early-wilting responses by associating Sentinel-2 time-series statistics of the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index with visually classified orthophotos, using a random forest classifier. The predictions of our classifier achieved a high accuracy of 0.90 ±0.014 and estimated the area of affected forest at 21’500 ±2800 km2. Early wilting was especially prevalent in eastern and central Germany and in the Czech Republic and it was related to high temperatures and low precipitation at large-scales, and small to medium-sized trees, steep slopes, and shallow soils at fine-scales. The present dataset includes spatial predictons of 2018 early-wilting presence/absence for entire Central Europe (c. 800'000 km2) at 10×10 m resolution. It may be used for high-resolution studies of early-wilting patterns,...