Abstract
The southeast coastal area of China (SCAC), a typhoon-prone area with a long coastline, suffers severe damage from typhoons almost every year. Exploring the spatial characteristics of historical typhoon-induced vegetation damage (VD) is crucial to predicting VD after severe typhoon landfalls and improving strategies for vegetation protection and restoration. Remote sensing is an efficient and feasible approach for measuring large-scale VD caused by natural disasters. This paper, by exploring the spatial distribution of VD of every severe landfalling typhoon with Google Earth Engine (GEE), aims to reveal the spatial characteristics of typhoon-induced VD in SCAC. Firstly, the values of disaster vegetation damage index (DVDI), difference in enhanced vegetation index (DEVI), and normalized difference vegetation index (DNDVI) for the 28 selected landing typhoons in SCAC were calculated and compared by using moderate resolution imaging spectroradiometer (MODIS) data in GEE. Secondly, every DVDI image was overlaid with land cover, elevation, relative aspect and typhoon path layers in ArcGIS. Thirdly, spatial characteristics of VD were revealed with the aid of spatial statistical analysis. The study found that: (1) DVDI is a more effective index for evaluating VD caused by typhoons. (2) The Pearl River Delta is the most severe VD region. The severe VD regions for four typhoon groups have significantly spatial correlation with typhoon-landing locations. (3) Forests are ranked the first in terms of damaged areas by typhoon in every year, followed by sparse forests. (4) Topography has no influence on VD by a single typhoon event, and relative aspect has no correlation with VD caused by typhoons in SCAC.
Highlights
The southeast coastal area of China (SCAC), with its long coastline and location in a typhoon-active area, suffers severe damages from typhoons almost every year
(4) Topography has no influence on vegetation damage (VD) by a single typhoon event, and relative aspect has no correlation with VD caused by typhoons in SCAC
For Typhoon Mangkhu (Figure 4a–c), comparing the results of difference in enhanced vegetation index (DEVI) and disaster vegetation damage index (DVDI), the distribution of DVDI has the strongest correlation with typhoon path, and the distribution of the noise of DVDI is the least; For Typhoons Mujigea, Vongfong, Usagi, and for 18 out of the 24 other typhoons, the same pattern can be found
Summary
The southeast coastal area of China (SCAC), with its long coastline and location in a typhoon-active area, suffers severe damages from typhoons almost every year. According to statistics [1], 43 typhoons landed in SCAC from 2000 to 2018 and resulted in extensive vegetation damage (VD) and enormous economic loss. Understanding the spatial characteristics of historically typhoon-induced VD is crucial to projecting VD after severe typhoon landfall and improving strategies for vegetation protection and restoration. Earth Engine (GEE) can be more efficient due to its analysis-ready satellite image archive, scalable computing power, and integrated analysis capabilities. The GEE public data catalog is made up of earth-observing remote images, including the entire MODIS, Landsat, Sentinel-1&2 archives, as well as land cover data and many other geophysical, environmental and socio-economic datasets [13]. This study has two objectives: (1) to test whether DVDI can be applied to evaluate VD caused by typhoons in GEE; (2) to explore the spatial characteristics of VD by historical landing typhoons in SCAC
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