Monitoring forest decline through remote sensing time series analysis

Abstract

In Europe, the 2003 summer heat wave damaged forested areas. This study aims to compare two approaches of NDVI time series analysis to monitor forest decline. Both methods analyze the trend of vegetation activity from 2000 to 2011. The first method is based on a phenometric related to spring vegetation activity, calculated for each year during the 2000–2011 period. In the second method (BFAST), the trend comes from the decomposition of the NDVI time series into three additive components: trend, seasonal and remainder. The two approaches gave similar results for estimated trends. The main advantage of BFAST is its ability to detect breakpoints in the linear trend. It allowed to highlight here the impact of exceptional events, like 2003 summer drought, on the development of forest stands. In the last part of our study, we implemented a validation based on in situ observations. Health status of silver fir stands was estimated analyzing the trees architecture. Significant relationships were highlighted between the indicator of spring vitality derived from remote sensing images and the observed status of forest stands.