Input Layers: Disturbance Frequency (DIST)

Data was sourced from the Northeastern Forest Health Atlas in the form of a disturbance vector shapefile representing the occurrence of all disturbances across the northeast since 1997. Two different datasets were produced. One was produced incorporating all disturbances, which used no filtering. A climate-based disturbance layer was also produced, filtering to only include disturbances stemming from drought, flooding, frost, tornadoes, hurricanes, or winter precipitation. Beyond the filtering stage, the remaining methods remain constant for each layer.
Features were then dissolved by year using the “Dissolve” geoprocessing tool, and overlapping disturbances were counted using “Union” function followed by a “Count Overlapping Features” function. The polygon-based shapefile was then converted to a 30m raster, while backfilling null values to be zero. Values were then rescaled to a 0- 100 scale using linear methods.