Estimation of the quantity of dead wood after windthrow through aereal images in Tuscany, Italy

Tuscany has suffered severe windstorms in the last five years, causing major damages to the forests. Quantifying the damage after these disturbances has been the main concern for authorities. The objective of this study was develop a new, cost effective methodology to estimate dead wood volumes post windthrow through remote sensing and GIS tools, testing a supervised photo-interpretation in combination with LIS and an unsupervised photo-interpretation called NCC through RGB images with 0.2 m GSD. Additionally, field-assessed were obtained as control data. The study area was conducted in the Tuscany region, where 10 areas were selected. The species affected were mostly conifers. The results obtained by the unsupervised were better than supervised, but both methods did not show statistically significant differences. The NCC method showed promising results, but mostly in big areas, where the results showed accurate volumes. On the other side, small areas are not suitable to be under NCC methods yet, due to the low accuracy obtained in the volumes in this study