Forest ThreatNet

The Threat Center's innovative High-resolution Forest Mapping (HiForm) tool is attracting attention for its ability to detect and map forest disturbances with impressive detail and accuracy. HiForm uses satellite data and cloud computing to reveal impacts from wildfires, tornadoes, and more – but recent pine mortality events driven by drought and pine beetles have brought the tool front-and-center. 

Late last year, the South experienced an extremely hot and sudden drought. When temperatures are high and moisture is low, trees become vulnerable quickly. Across southwest Mississippi and eastern Louisiana, approximately 12 million pine trees began dying. By early winter, 83,000 acres of pines had died. That estimate was derived with HiForm. A Mississippi news story in The Daily Leader (Brookhaven, MS) reported on a collaboration with the Mississippi Forestry Commission, bringing HiForm to bear on the problem. Threat Center researchers Steve Norman and Bill Christie worked with the Forestry Commission to deliver a highly accurate and detailed map of likely pine mortality associated with the recent drought and insect outbreaks. In this way, HiForm is leveraging recent advances in satellite imagery and cloud computing to provide near-real time information to resource managers in time to respond effectively to forest disturbances.

Top image: Ips beetles and other pine beetles are about the size of a grain of rice. Even when trees are drought-stressed, it takes millions of these tiny insects to kill them. Forest Service photo by Erich Vallery. 

Bottom image: Processed HiForm imagery of likely pine mortality, superimposed on an aerial photo of the affected forest lands (warmer colors represent pine decline and death). The HiForm team developed a method for isolating recent pine deaths from other disturbances. Forest Service image. 

View the online map of recent pine mortality in Mississippi.

Southern Research Station's HiForm news release, March 2024.