GanzK_ESIP_July_Poster.pdf

<p>Drought and wood-boring insects killed 1-5% of all trees in California from 2012 – 2016. Climate change will intensify both threats yet predicting forest mortality on the landscape remains difficult. Forest mortality is measured either as individual dead trees in aerial imagery or as general polygons drawn by trained observers in an aircraft. We sought to compare these data sources for forecasting drought and insect-induced forest mortality in the western US and the southern Sierra Nevada. We found that only individual tree mortality maps resulted in a model that outperformed a naive baseline. To outperform naivity at a national scale, we suspect that individual tree mortality maps derived from imagery are necessary.</p>