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Characterizing the amount and configuration of forests can provide insights into habitat quality, biodiversity, and land use. The establishment of protected areas can be a mechanism for maintaining large, contiguous areas of forests, and the loss and fragmentation of forest habitat is a potential threat to Canada's national park system. Using the Earth Observation for Sustainable Development of Forests (EOSD) land cover product (EOSD LC 2000), we characterize the circa 2000 forest patterns in 26 of Canada's national parks and compare these to forest patterns in the ecological units surrounding these parks, referred to as the greater park ecosystem (GPE). Five landscape pattern metrics were analyzed: number of forest...
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The recovery of forests following stand-replacing disturbance is of widespread interest; however, there is both a lack of definitional clarity for the term “recovery” and a dearth of empirical data on the rates of forest recovery associated with different disturbance types. We conducted a quantitative review of literature to determine recovery times following wildfire and timber harvest and to evaluate variation in recovery rates across Canada’s diverse forest ecosystems. Recovery was assessed according to the rate of change associated with certain forest structural attributes that have traditionally been used as indicators of forest growth and productivity. The recovery of forest canopy cover, tree height, and...
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Mean stand height is an important parameter for forest volume and biomass estimation in support of monitoring and management activities. Information on mean stand height is typically obtained through the manual interpretation of aerial photography, often supplemented by the collection of field calibration data. In remote areas where forest management practices may not be spatially exhaustive or where it is difficult to acquire aerial photography, alternate approaches for estimating stand height are required. One approach is to use very high spatial resolution (VHSR) satellite imagery (pixels sided less than 1m) as a surrogate for air photos. In this research we demonstrate an approach for modelling mean stand height...
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The objective of this study is to provide an approach for assessing the short-term risk of mountain pine beetle Dendroctonus ponderosae Hopkins (Coleoptera: Scolytidae) attack over large forested areas based on the spatial-temporal behavior of beetle spread. This is accomplished by integrating GIS, aerial overview surveys, and local indicators of spatial association (LISA) in order to measure the spatial relationships of mountain pine beetle impacts from one year to the next. Specifically, we implement a LISA method called the bivariate local Moran's Ii to estimate the risk of mountain pine beetle attack across the pine distribution of British Columbia, Canada. The bivariate local Moran's Ii provides a means for...
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Forests are an important global resource, playing key roles in both the environment and the economy. The implementation of quality national monitoring programs is required for the generation of robust national statistics, which in turn support global reporting. Conventional monitoring initiatives based on samples of field plots have proven robust but are difficult and costly to implement and maintain, especially for large jurisdictions or where access is difficult. To address this problem, air photo- and satellite-based large area mapping and monitoring programs have been developed; however, these programs also require ground measurements for calibration and validation. To mitigate this need for ground plot data...
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