Canopy damage and recovery following Hurricane Maria using multitemporal lidar data, Mar/2017 - Mar/2020, Puerto Rico

Dataset · Fri Jan 01 04:00:00 EST 2021

DOI:https://doi.org/10.15486/ngt/1797399· OSTI ID:1797399

Leitold, Veronika ^[1]; Morton, Doug ^[2]; Martinuzzi, Sebastian ^[3]; Paynter, Ian; Uriarte, Maria; Keller, Michael ^[4]; Ferraz, Antonio ^[5]; Cook, Bruce ^[2]; Corp, Lawrence; González, Grizelle ^[6]

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1. Lawrence Berkeley National Lab
2. NASA
3. University of Wisconsin
4. United States Forest Service
5. NASA/JPL
6. IITF

Hurricane Maria (Category 4) snapped and uprooted canopy trees, removed large branches, and defoliated vegetation across Puerto Rico. The magnitude of forest damages and the rates and mechanisms of forest recovery following Maria provide important benchmarks for understanding the ecology of extreme events. We used airborne lidar data acquired before (2017) and after Maria (2018, 2020) to quantify landscape-scale changes in forest structure along a 439-ha elevational gradient (100 to 800 m) in the Luquillo Experimental Forest. Damages from Maria were widespread, with 73% of the study area losing ≥1 m in canopy height (mean = -7.1 m). Taller forests at lower elevations suffered more damage than shorter forests above 600 m. Yet only 13% of the study area had canopy heights ≤2 m in 2018, a typical threshold for forest gaps, highlighting the importance of damaged trees and advanced regeneration on post-storm forest structure. Heterogeneous patterns of regrowth and recruitment yielded shorter and more open forests by 2020. Nearly 45% of forests experienced initial height loss (<-1 m, 2017-2018) followed by rapid height gain (>1 m, 2018-2020), whereas 21.6% of forests with initial height losses showed little or no height gain, and 17.8% of forests exhibited no structural changes >|1| m in either period. Canopy layers <10 m accounted for most increases in canopy height and fractional cover between 2018-2020, with gains split evenly between height growth and lateral crown expansion by surviving individuals. These findings benchmark rates of gap formation, crown expansion, and canopy closure following hurricane damage. Included in the attached zip file are four TIF and four KML files.

• Research Organization: Next-Generation Ecosystem Experiments Tropics; NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
• Sponsoring Organization: US Department of Energy, USDA Forest Service, US Department of Interior, NASA
• OSTI ID: 1797399
• Report Number(s): NGT0172
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES