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...

2018年10月10日，五级飓风迈克尔（Hurricane Michael）以五级强度于美国佛罗里达狭长地带的墨西哥海滩登陆。此次风暴对佛罗里达狭长地带及佐治亚州的森林造成了显著影响。本研究选取2018年飓风登陆前，在受迈克尔飓风影响的林区中布设的248块森林样地数据与Sentinel-2（哨兵二号）遥感影像，构建了适用于全区域的林木断面积一般线性模型（general linear model）。本研究以林木存在模型作为障碍模型（hurdle），将断面积模型的适用范围限定在有林木分布的区域。研究借助飓风灾后的Sentinel-2影像完成模型参数校准，并通过对比飓风前后的林木断面积分布图，评估飓风引发的林木断面积损失情况。该一般线性模型的决定系数（r-squared）为0.508。本研究结果生成了空间分辨率为10米的佛罗里达狭长地带林木断面积损失范围详细分布图。研究人员对原有样地进行重访以对模型结果开展地面验证，结果显示该模型在森林分类任务中表现优异……