Long-term hurricane impacts and recovery differ among forest uses and ownerships
In 2018, Hurricane Michael had major impacts across urban forests, industrial forests, and small woodlots, but the subsequent recovery of these forests has varied.
Hurricane Michael damaged forests across a broad land use gradient, but impacts to urban, woodlot and industrial forests have been difficult to uniformly monitor and compare. Southern Research Station scientists are developing a new workflow using high resolution remote sensing and parcel data to understand how different forest uses were impacted by the storm and how they recovered through 2021. The team created a high-resolution map of forest cover for a five-county area in Florida for 2017, then assessed annual change in the NDVI Vegetation Index using Sentinel-2 satellite imagery, which has unusually high, 10-meter resolution. This allows precise measurement of change within small forest lots, but is also computationally demanding—the team utilized leading-edge cloud computing resources to handle image processing. Unique behaviors of vegetation change were identified over four years since hurricane impact, capturing disturbance intensity and recovery. Comparisons across urban density and forest type gradients show that first-year damage, and recovery in subsequent years, reflected both local factors and large-scale gradients. Initial findings suggest that forests are recovering differently in different localities, depending on ownership, land use, and forest type. These insights will support efforts to improve the resilience of landscapes with mixed land uses that are prone to hurricane damage in the future.
