North Carolina’s forest disturbance and timber production assessed using time series Landsat observations

Wood products provide a relatively long-term carbon storage mechanism.Due to lack of consistent datasets on these products,however,it is difficult to determine their carbon contents.The main purpose of this study was to quantify forest disturbance and timber product output(TPO)using time series Landsat observations for North Carolina.The results revealed that North Carolina had an average forest disturbance rate of 178,000 ha per year from 1985 to 2010.The derived disturbance products were found to be highly correlated with TPO survey data,explaining up to 87%of the total variance of county level industrial roundwood production.State level TPO estimates derived using the Landsat-based disturbance products tracked those derived from ground-based survey data closely.The TPO modeling approach developed in this study complements the ground-based TPO surveys conducted by the US Forest Service.It allows derivation of TPO estimates for the years that did not have TPO survey data,and may be applicable in other regions or countries where at least some ground-based survey data on timber production are available for model development and dense time series Landsat observations exist for developing annual forest disturbance products.