Quantifying the Response of German Forests to Drought Events via Satellite Imagery

Forest systems provide crucial ecosystem functions to our environment, such as balancing carbon stocks and influencing the local, regional global climate. A trend towards an increasing frequency of climate change induced extreme weather events, including drought, is hereby a major challenge for forest management. Within this context, application remote sensing data provides powerful means fast, operational inexpensive investigations over large spatial scales time. This study was dedicated explore potential satellite in combination with harmonic analyses quantifying vegetation response drought events German forests. The modelling method compared z-score standardization approach correlated against both, meteorological topographical data. Optical imagery from Landsat Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) used three commonly applied indices. Highest correlation scores based on technique were computed 6th degree. MODIS Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) generated best results measuring spectral conditions. Strongest between measures observed soil moisture self-calibrated Palmer Drought Severity (scPDSI). Furthermore, forests regions sandy soils pine dominant tree type identified be particularly vulnerable drought. In addition, suggested mitigated affects along hill slopes. While proposed approaches valuable information about dynamics conditions, standardized in-situ measurements larger related quantification are required further in-depth quality assessment methods