Evaluating the consistency of different forest disturbance datasets

Forest health and disturbance data are crucial to improve our understanding about impacts of climate change on the multiple services forests provide (CO2 sequestration, water cycling, timber production, recreation and culture, etc.). Recently, several new datasets with different acquisition methods and at different spatial and temporal scaleshave become available. While such datasets provide invaluable information, the consistency of the information they provide needs to be evaluated.

The aim of this study is to evaluate the consistency of three publicly available tree mortality and disturbance datasets. We compared the consistency of the datasets in terms of their reported timing and the driving disturbance agents for events occurring from 2000 to 2021. Preliminary results indicate some overlap of disturbance events, but with important temporal lags between different datasets. An exact overlap in space and time is rare, which might be due to different acquisition methods as well as the spatial scale and magnitude of the disturbance.