Disturbance Attribution

One major limitation of the Landtrendr change dectection algorithm is that while it can detect changes in forest canopy cover and label them as a disturbance, it can not attribute a causal agent to that event. This means that a user has to use other sources of information, tax maps, aerial imagery, field visits, to determine the cause of the disturbance. For people who are intersted in using the Landtrendr algorihtm for harvest monitoring, carbon credit programs or to invesitgate a specific cause of disturbance like forest fires or invasive insect outbreaks, this is a major limiting factor.

However, there is a wealth of infomation that can be collected from Landtrendr outputs, as well as other auxillery sources of information that can be used to create a seperate classifier algorithm to assign causal agents to disturbance events. This project utilizes landscape metrics, spectral trajectories, topographical information, and landscape context factors to assign causal agents to disturbance patches generated by the Landtrendr algorihtm.

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Key Papers

  • Kennedy, R. E., Yang, Z., & Cohen, W. B. (2010). Detecting trends in forest disturbance and recovery using yearly Landsat time series: 1. LandTrendr — Temporal segmentation algorithms. Remote Sensing of Environment, 114(12), 2897–2910.
  • Kennedy, R. E., Yang, Z., Braaten, J., Copass, C., Antonova, N., Jordan, C., & Nelson, P. (2015). Attribution of disturbance change agent from Landsat time-series in support of habitat monitoring in the Puget Sound region, USA. Remote Sensing of Environment, 166, 271–285. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rse.2015.05.005
  • Stahl, A. T., Andrus, R., Hicke, J. A., Hudak, A. T., Bright, B. C., & Meddens, A. J. H. (2023). Automated attribution of forest disturbance types from remote sensing data: A synthesis. Remote Sensing of Environment, 285, 113416. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rse.2022.113416
  • Sebald, J., Senf, C., & Seidl, R. (2021). Human or natural? Landscape context improves the attribution of forest disturbances mapped from Landsat in Central Europe. Remote Sensing of Environment, 262, 112502. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rse.2021.112502

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Date Title Author
Oct 12, 2023 Disturbance Attribution: Initial Results Madeleine Desrochers
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