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Project
Summary and Overview: |
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"What
areas are forested ?" All of the above are questions asked by resource managers every day in public and private forests across the United States. With more than 700 million acres of land covered by forest in the United States, the task of mapping and inventorying forested lands is a challenging one. Detailed and accurate maps of forest condition and structure are a necessity for rigorous ecosystem management. Forest maps are a fundamental information source for fire behavior modeling, animal habitat management, prediction and mapping of forest insect infestations, and plant and animal biodiversity assessment. |
 Digital
images acquired by earth imaging satellites are being used to
help forest managers provide this information. Satellite
images, when analyzed using advanced geostatistical techniques,
can produce information on forest condition and structure, information
that can be used to help answer questions such as those posed
above. Satellite imagery has been used for many years to
map land cover in forested regions, but natural resource managers
are also starting to use remotely sensed satellite imagery to
calculate the age, density, species, and successional state of
forests under their care. |
| In May 1999, KU's Kansas Applied Remote Sensing (KARS) Program was chosen by NASA to develop methods that use remote-sensing data and advanced geostatistical methods to create maps of forest age and successional state, or "cover types," and of forest biophysical factors, including density, biomass, leaf area, basal area, and height. Geostatistical methods take advantage of the spatial dependence in forest variables and remotely sensed data. By calibrating remotely sensed multispectral data with a small number of ground measurements, characteristics of the forest measured at sample points can be extrapolated across a large geographic region. This has significant advantages for forest management, especially when forests are in remote or inaccessible locations. |
 The
project will also develop two demonstration projects, showing
the use of remote sensing and geostatistical analysis for insect
damage assessment, and for mapping forest cover types. As
an important part of the technology transfer from research and
development to the user community, software modules that interface
with current remote sensing analysis systems will be developed. An
Internet web site will be developed, containing an online tutorial
on geostatistics and remote sensing for forest inventory and
characterization, the software modules developed in this project,
online demonstrations of the geostatistical procedures (using
the cover type mapping and insect damage applications described
above), and a web site where the software modules and sample
field and image datasets used in this project can be downloaded. |
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