The Role of Remote Sensing for the Assessment and Monitoring of Forest Health: A Systematic Evidence Synthesis

Abstract

Forests are increasingly subject to a number of disturbances that can adversely influence their health. Remote sensing offers an efficient alternative for assessing and monitoring forest health. A myriad of methods based upon remotely sensed data have been developed, tailored to the different definitions of forest health considered, and covering a broad range of spatial and temporal scales. The purpose of this review paper is to identify and analyse studies that addressed forest health issues applying remote sensing techniques, in addition to studying the methodological wealth present in these papers. For this matter, we applied the PRISMA protocol to seek and select studies of our interest and subsequently analyse the information contained within them. A final set of 107 journal papers published between 2015 and 2020 was selected for evaluation according to our filter criteria and 20 selected variables. Subsequently, we pair-wise exhaustively read the journal articles and extracted and analysed the information on the variables. We found that (1) the number of papers addressing this issue have consistently increased, (2) that most of the studies placed their study area in North America and Europe and (3) that satellite-borne multispectral sensors are the most commonly used technology, especially from Landsat mission. Finally, most of the studies focused on evaluating the impact of a specific stress or disturbance factor, whereas only a small number of studies approached forest health from an early warning perspective.

Remote Sensing Assessment of the Expansion of Ips typographus Attacks in the Chuprene Reserve, Western Balkan Range

“…The remote sensing image data provided useful information for the detection of the damages caused by bark beetles and root rot disease outbreaks. Analyses of remote sensing techniques in 107 journal papers published between 2015 and 2020 showed that, despite the emergence of new technologies and methods, multispectral data are still the prevalent source in forest health assessment [14]. However, in the Polish part of the Białowie ża Forest, the spread of the I. typographus outbreak was estimated by mapping dead spruce stands on a tree level using airborne hyperspectral and laser scanning data obtained from HySpex VNIR-1800 camera and Riegl LMS-Q680i scanner [15,16].…”

Strategic roadmap to assess forest vulnerability under air pollution and climate change

“…Previous studies have demonstrated the utility of optical remote sensing for assessing a variety of forest health indices, and are commonly used in forest monitoring activities (Curran et al, 1992; Huang et al, 2019; Parent & Verbyla, 2010). Landsat satellite images are still the most widely used Earth Observation (EO) data in forest health studies (Torres et al, 2021), which provide continuous time series data from the 1970s (i.e., Landsat 1 mission) until today (i.e., Landsat 8). Access to Landsat images has been free since 2008, and the recently launched Landsat 9 (September 2021) will be publicly available in early 2022.…”

UAV-Based Forest Health Monitoring: A Systematic Review

“…Satellite-based RS still dominates forest health research. The most frequently used data are publicly accessible imagery such as Landsat, MODIS, and Sentinel [19]. The large area coverage makes satellites valuable tools at multiple scales.…”