Changes in vegetation distribution are underway in Arctic and boreal regions due to climate warming and associated fire disturbance. These changes have wide ranging downstream impacts—affecting wildlife habitat, nutrient cycling, climate feedbacks and fire regimes. It is thus critical to understand where these changes are occurring and what types of vegetation are affected, and to quantify the magnitude of the changes. In this study, we mapped live aboveground biomass for five common plant functional types (PFTs; deciduous shrubs, evergreen shrubs, forbs, graminoids and lichens) within Alaska and northwest Canada, every five years from 1985 to 2020. We employed a multi-scale approach, scaling from field harvest data and unmanned aerial vehicle-based biomass predictions to produce wall-to-wall maps based on climatological, topographic, phenological and Landsat spectral predictors. We found deciduous shrub and graminoid biomass were predicted best among PFTs. Our time-series analyses show increases in deciduous (37%) and evergreen shrub (7%) biomass, and decreases in graminoid (14%) and lichen (13%) biomass over a study area of approximately 500 000 km2. Fire was an important driver of recent changes in the study area, with the largest changes in biomass associated with historic fire perimeters. Decreases in lichen and graminoid biomass often corresponded with increasing shrub biomass. These findings illustrate the driving trends in vegetation change within the Arctic/boreal region. Understanding these changes and the impacts they in turn will have on Arctic and boreal ecosystems will be critical to understanding the trajectory of climate change in the region.
Orndahl, Kathleen M., Matthew J. Macander, Logan T. Berner, and Scott J. Goetz. 2022. “Plant Functional Type Aboveground Biomass Change within Alaska and Northwest Canada Mapped Using a 35-Year Satellite Time Series from 1985 to 2020.” Environmental Research Letters 17 (11): 115010. https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/AC9D50.
Kathleen Orndahl. 2022. "Gridded estimates of aboveground biomass by plant functional type within Alaska and Yukon, 1985-2020." Arctic Data Center. doi:10.18739/A2222R74D.
This repository includes scripts and data for mapping plant functional type aboveground biomass across Alaska and northwest Canada.
Scripts are prepended with numbers for organization, see details below for script groupings:
- Prepare UAV based training data
- Prepare field based training data
- Feature selection
- Modeling - cross validation
- Modeling - aggregate results
- Modeling - final models
- Fit final models
- Monte Carlo permutations
- Map across study area
- Accuracy assessment