Forest Disturbance Polygons containing Dieback and Clearcuts at Five Locations in Germany

The Geopackages contain polygonized data representing observations from airborne digital orthophotos (DOP) for the 9 classes described below, mainly focussing on forest disturbance. The five Geopackages represent areas between 2*2km and 4*4km in Rhineland-Palatinate (RLP), Northrhine-Westphalia (NRW), Saxony (SAX), Thuringia (THU) and Brandenburg (BB).

Observation dates based on the following DOP’s for each AOI (available online for free):

• RLP: September 6th/7th, 2021

• NRW: June 14th, 2021

• BB: June 18th, 2022

• THU: June 15th/19th, 2022

• SAX: June 3rd, 2022

Geopackages contain the following classes in the field „dmg_cat“:

• class 1: dead coniferous tree

• class 2: dead broadleaved tree

• class 3: dead tree (unclear tree type)

• class 4: planned to represent „thinning“, but not used; coded as class 6 if observed

• class 5: infrastructure/gravel road/road/building/timber piles/arable land/meadow/grassland/etc. (used to mask out non-forested area)

• class 6: clear-cut/harvest, including lying deadwood and bare soil that was not visible in the preceeding DOP (presumably a thinning operation or cleared tree after dieback)

• class 7: apparent re-growth, e.g. re-planting after clear-cut

• class 8: vegetated, non-forested non-disturbance area within forest patch, e.g. glade

• class 9: bare soil (no disturbance area)

The orthoimages of the observation date were compared to previous orthoimages to determine if a potential clearcut, for instance, is actually a glade or bare ground. This is to try to ensure that the disturbance actually happened in the up to 4 years preceeding the respective observation.

CRS: EPSG:3035

In case this dataset is used in your publication, please cite this repository.