Spatially Quantifying Forest Damage from a Category 5 Hurricane

Hurricane Michael made landfall on Mexico Beach, Florida panhandle as a
Category 5 storm on October 10th, 2018. The storm had a large impact on
the forests in the Florida panhandle and into Georgia. In this study we
use Sentinel-2 imagery and 248 forest plots collected prior to landfall in
2018 in the forests impacted by Hurricane Michael to build a general
linear model of tree basal area across the landscape. The basal area model
was constrained to areas where trees were present using a tree presence
model as a hurdle.  We informed the model with post hurricane
Sentinel-2 imagery and compared the pre and post hurricane basal area maps
to assess the loss of basal area following the hurricane. The basal area
model had an r-squared value of 0.508. Our results provide a detailed map
showing the extent of basal area loss across the Florida panhandle at 10m
spatial scale. Plots were revisited to ground truth the modelled results
and showed that the model performed well at categorizing forest hurricane
damage. This study demonstrates the use of remotely sensed imagery and
in-situ forest measurements to rapidly quantify, using common forestry
metrics, forest damage from large natural disturbances at spatial
resolution useful to inform disaster response management decisions.