High-Resolution Satellite Identified Forest Mortality Exhibiting Rapid ʻŌhiʻa Death Symptoms 2013 to 2023 on East Hawai'i Island

The Maxar Technologies WorldView Legion satellite constellation collects imagery with a maximum 50 cm resolution, making it suitable for suspect tree identification. Maxar multispectral satellite images were provided via funding from the National Geospatial Agency and National Reconnaissance Office and used to create a time series dataset of red and brown-crown tree mortality from 2013-2023. A 105-day window for each annual timestep was used to maximize the number of cloud-free images available for analysis while minimizing changes in symptomatic crown stage across images. The resulting satellite imagerywas systematically and manually analyzed to identify clusters of symptomatic tree crowns exhibiting red or brown colored canopies based on a ROD detection protocol developed for drone and helicopter imagery. Clusters were defined as ten or more suspect symptomatic tree crowns located within a 500 m grid cell superimposed over the imagery. The 2016 mortality clusters followed the ten minimum crowns per 500 m grid, but were derived from identified individual suspects. Datasets are in WGS-84, UTM Zone 5N (EPSG: 32605).