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Dryad

Spatially Quantifying Forest Damage from a Category 5 Hurricane

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Dec 17, 2019 version files 7.52 GB

Abstract

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.