Abstract
The use of satellite data to detect forest areas impacted by extreme events, such as droughts, heatwaves, or fires is largely documented, however, the use of these data to identify the heterogeneity of the forests’ response to determine fine scale spatially irregular damage is less explored. This paper evaluates the health status of forests in southern Italy affected by adverse climate conditions during the hot and dry summer of 2017, using Sentinel-2 images (10m) and in situ data. Our analysis shows that the post-event—NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index) decrease, observed in five experimental sites, well accounts for the heterogeneity of the local response to the climate event evaluated in situ through the Mannerucci and the Raunkiaer methods. As a result, Sentinel-2 data can be effectively integrated with biological information from field surveys to introduce continuity in the estimation of climate change impacts even in very heterogeneous areas whose details could not be captured by lower resolution observations. This integration appears to be a successful strategy in the study of the relationships between the climate and forests from a dynamical perspective.
Highlights
The health of forests has been under increased scrutiny over the last few decades and climate change is a major contributor [1,2]
The approach we followed to evaluate the coherence between in-situ and Sentinel-2 satellite data is based on the use of NDVI data as proxy for the average photosynthetic activity at the pixel level
This study investigated the consistency between in-situ data and Sentinel-2 imagery to assess the health status of forests affected by adverse climate conditions in 2017, classified as one of the driest and warmest years since 1800
Summary
The health of forests has been under increased scrutiny over the last few decades and climate change is a major contributor [1,2]. The stochasticity, frequency and magnitude of extreme weather events outside the range of normal values or rare within a statistical range at a particular place and time of year [3] have increased on a global scale [4,5,6], and their damaging impacts are expected to increase in the future [7] These negative trends are mainly increasing in Europe [8], especially in the Mediterranean regions, where the climate has been warmer and drier [9,10] since the end of the last century. When drought is contextual to a prolonged period of abnormally hot weather (heatwave), the effects on forests can be destructive
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