Research

Stand-Level Tree Mortality Detection

Forests worldwide are facing increased tree mortality and accurate and comprehensive monitoring of tree mortality is essential for developing forest management. Satellite imagery from sources like PlanetScope (3-m) and Sentinel-2 (10-m), providing widespread coverage and frequent revisits at minimum to no cost and has become largely available since 2017, facilitates large-scale mapping of tree mortality at stand level. This project aims to assess the detectability of tree mortality at stand level using these satellites.

Dead trees in the Yellowstone National Park

Horizontal species shift across CONUS in the past 20 years

Tree Shift across CONUS

Tree species distributions shift in response to climate change and disturbances. Understanding the dynamics of these shifts is crucial for predicting future changes in forest ecosystems and for developing effective management strategies. This project seeks to comprehend how combined effects of climate change and disturbances influence tree species shifts, both horizontally and vertically and whether the shifts are keeping pace with the rate of climate change.

Land Surface Phenology and Wildfires

Land surface phenology (LSP) derived from satellite data has been widely associated with recent global climate change. However, LSP is frequently influenced by land disturbances such as wildfires, which significantly limits our understanding of the phenological trends driven by climate change. We investigated the wildfire impacts on both magnitudes and trends of LSP based on 838 forest fires occurred from 2002-2014 over the western US. More wildfires caused an earlier start of growing season and a delayed end of growing season. LSP trends from the burned areas were strongly dependent on the year of wildfire occurrence in a long time series.

Comparison of land surface phenology between burned areas and unburned references

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