European Forest Disturbance Atlas

Description

This repository holds maps of annual forest disturbances across 38 European countries derived from Landsat satellite data. The European Forest Disturbance Atlas currently covers the period 1985-2023 and consists of a set of maps:

• The year of disturbance layers contain the year of the most recent disturbance event in the time-series, the greatest disturbance in terms of spectral change and stack of annual disturbances indicating undisturbed (0) and disturbed (1).
• The number of disturbances layer shows the number of disturbance events detected within the time-series.
• The disturbance severity layer indicates the spectral change in NBR relative to pre-disturbance.
• The disturbance agent layer summarises the attribution of agents over the full time series. The causal agents assigned are wind/bark beetle complex (1), fire (2), harvest (3) and mixed agents (4, where more than one agent occurred). The stack of disturbance agents provides annual information on causal agent assigned.

The maps are available per country as GeoTIFF. The spatial reference system is EPSG 3035 (ETRS89 / LAEA Europe). The most current version is 2.1.1. The maps will be updated regularly. The maps can also be explored online.

Version history

• 2.0.0 - Initial version, covering 1985-2021.
• 2.1.0 - Maps updated until 2023. Added forest land use layer and annual stacks of disturbances (including annual disturbance probabilities and disturbance agents).
• 2.1.1 - Improvements to the disturbance maps introduced and disturbance severity layer added.

Known issues

• Some SLC-off artefacts (both version 2.0.0 and 2.1.0).
• Known errors related to the forest mask of Belarus, Moldova and Ukraine (now corrected in 2.1.0)
• Known some false disturbances mapped north of 67°N in Norway, Sweeden and Finland.