Integrating remote sensing and forest inventory data for assessing the BWCAC blowdown

The USDA Forest Service’s Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program conducts strategic inventories of our Nation’s forest resources. There is increasing need to assess effects of forest disturbance from catastrophic events, often within geographic extents not typically addressed by strategic forest inventories. One such event occurred within the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW), where a severe windstorm caused extensive damage to the area’s forest land. We combined forest inventory data with geospatial datasets derived from satellite remote sensing to assess characteristics of BWCAW blowdown forest area and volume. Net volume per hectare of all live trees was significantly lower in blowdown areas, and damage severity varied by location and forest type. Both plot-level FIA data and satellite image-based data were useful for identifying blowdown forest. Plot-based estimates of blowdown forest area were slightly larger than satellite image-based estimates, but this difference diminished after adjusting for image cloud cover. We present an approach for using remote sensing data for constraining analyses to the approximate vicinity of blowdown damage, coupled with analysis of FIA data stratified by field observations of wind damage