Global satellite monitoring of climate-induced vegetation disturbances

Climatically driven terrestrial disturbances such as drought, biotic agents, wind, and wildfire are suspected to be accelerating in size and severity globally. Many disturbances and their impacts go un-quantified, however, due to the lack of a comprehensive monitoring system that can detect, attribute, determine causation, and establish consequences of disturbances. Remote sensing has experienced rapid evolution over recent years and now offers enormous potential for nearly continuous, wall-to-wall observation and interpretation of disturbances and their drivers. Here we review the state of optical remote sensing in disturbance ecology, develop a framework for a global disturbance monitoring system, and provide evidence to support the framework. We make three broad conclusions regarding this idealized global disturbance monitoring system: (i) it should accurately detect disturbances and identify their proximal cause(s), and should be compatible with end-product objectives such as assessments of ecosystem resources or climate forcing; (ii) this system is now largely challenged by integrating global scale data with fine-scale monitoring; and (iii) a successful monitoring system can support representation of ecosystem disturbances and successional processes in Earth system models. The significant remaining challenges are tied to the ecology, extent, and grain of the disturbances because they directly affect our remotely sensed observations. An ecological perspective of remote sensing is therefore vital to continue rapid development of terrestrial disturbance monitoring.

MCDOWELL Nate G.;  COOPS Nicholas;  BECK Pieter;  CHAMBERS Jeffrey;  GANGODAGAMAGE Chandana;  HICKE Jeffrey A;  HUANG Cho-Ying;  KENNEDY Robert;  KROFCHECK Dan;  LITVAK Marcy;  MEDDENS Arjan;  MUSS Jordan;  NEGRÓN-JUAREZ Robinson;  PENG Changhui;  SCHWANTES Amanda;  SWENSON Jennifer;  VERNON Louis;  WILLIAMS A. Park;  XU Chonggang;  ZHAO Maosheng;  RUNNING Steve;  ALLEN Craig; 

2015-02-13

ELSEVIER SCIENCE LONDON

JRC90250

1360-1385,   

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1360138514002726,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC90250,   

10.1016/j.tplants.2014.10.008,