HR: 0800h
AN: B51C-0220    [Abstracts]
TI: A Landsat Record of North American Forest Disturbance
AU: Masek, J
EM: Jeffrey.G.Masek@nasa.gov
AF: Biospheric Sciences / Code 614.4, NASA GSFC, Greenbelt, MD 20771 United States
AU: * Hall, F G
EM: fghall@ltpmail.gsfc.nasa.gov
AF: Biospheric Sciences / Code 614.4, NASA GSFC, Greenbelt, MD 20771 United States
AU: Huang, C
EM: cqhuang@umd.edu
AF: Dept. Geography, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20771 United States
AU: Wolfe, R
EM: robert.e.wolfe@nasa.gov
AF: Biospheric Sciences / Code 614.4, NASA GSFC, Greenbelt, MD 20771 United States
AB: The Landsat Ecosystem Disturbance Adaptive Processing System (LEDAPS) is generating a decadal, wall-to-wall analysis of forest disturbance and recovery from Landsat satellite imagery for the period 1975-2000. The intent is to provide an accurate, high-resolution view of forest disturbance to support biogeochemical modeling and carbon accounting for the North American Carbon Program (NACP). Through the NASA Science Data Purchase program, substantially cloud-free Landsat MSS, TM, and ETM+ data were selected from the global archive and orthorectified to a UTM map base. The LEDAPS project has calibrated and atmospherically corrected these data (~2100 TM and ETM+ scenes to date) using the MODIS/6S radiative transfer approach. Forest disturbance and recovery is then calculated from the surface reflectance images using change detection techniques. An empirical spectral index (the `Disturbance Index') is used to classify pixels into classes exhibiting high rates of biomass loss over ten years (disturbance) or high rates of biomass gain (recovery). Initial results from North America show good correlation with areas of known harvest activity (Southeastern US, Maine, Pacific Northwest) and fire activity (Boreal forests). Additional work is concentrating on the use of canopy reflectance models to quantify changes in canopy properties in order to identify more subtle changes due to partial harvest and thinning. Initial versions of the surface reflectance and Disturbance Index products were released during 2005 (http://ledaps.nascom.nasa.gov/ledaps/ledaps_NorthAmerica.html).
DE: 0428 Carbon cycling (4806)
DE: 0434 Data sets
DE: 0439 Ecosystems, structure and dynamics (4815)
DE: 0480 Remote sensing
SC: Biogeosciences [B]
MN: Fall Meeting 2005