Improved monitoring of forest biomass and biomass change is needed to quantify natural and anthropogenic effects on the terrestrial carbon cycle. Landsat's temporal and spatial coverage, moderate spatial resolution, and long history of earth observations provide a unique opportunity for characterizing vegetation changes across large areas and long time scales....
Understanding fine-grain patterns of forest disturbance and regrowth at the landscape scale is critical for effective management, particularly in forests in western Washington, Oregon, and California, U.S., where the policy known as the Northwest Forest Plan (NWFP) was imposed in 1994 over > 8 million ha of forest in an...
The Northwest Forest Plan (NWFP), which aims to conserve late-successional and old-growth forests (older forests) and associated species, established new policies on federal lands in the Pacific Northwest USA. As part of monitoring for the NWFP, we tested nearest-neighbor imputation for mapping change in older forest, defined by threshold values...
To understand causes and consequences of landscape change, it is often not enough to simply detect change. Rather, the agent causing the change must also be determined. Here, we describe and test a method of change agent attribution built on four tenets: agents operate on patches rather than pixels; temporal...
Carbon sequestration is increasingly recognized as an ecosystem service, and forest management has a large potential to alter regional carbon fluxes − notably by way of harvest removals and related impacts on net ecosystem production (NEP). In the Pacific Northwest region of the U.S.,
the implementation of the Northwest Forest...
Lidar is currently the most accurate method for remote estimation of forest structure, but it has limited spatial and temporal coverage. Conversely, Landsat data are more widely available, but exhibit a weaker relationship with structure under medium to high leaf area conditions. One potentially valuable means of enhancing the relationship...
Our ability to assess the continental impacts of woody encroachment remains compromised by the paucity of studies quantifying regional encroachment rates. This knowledge gap is especially apparent when it comes to quantifying the impact of woody encroachment on large-scale carbon dynamics. In this study, we use a combination of aerial...
Insects are important forest disturbance agents, and mapping their effects on tree mortality and surface fuels represents a critical research challenge. Although various remote sensing approaches have been developed to monitor insect impacts, most studies have focused on single insect agents or single locations and have not related observed changes...
Understanding the causes and consequences of rapid environmental change is an essential scientific frontier, particularly given the threat of climate-and land use-induced changes in disturbance regimes. In western North America, recent widespread insect outbreaks and wildfires have sparked acute concerns about potential insect-fire interactions. Although previous research shows that insect...
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sun angles. We then computed
the relative differenced normalized burn ratio
(RdNBR (Miller and Thode
When characterizing the processes that shape ecosystems, ecologists increasingly use the unique perspective
offered by repeat observations of remotely sensed imagery. However, the concept of change embodied in much of
the traditional remote-sensing literature was primarily limited to capturing large or extreme changes occurring
in natural systems, omitting many more...
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imagery: Mount St Helens 1980–1995.
Remote Sens Environ 67: 309–19.
Li A, Huang C, Sun G, et al. 2011