Hurricane Disturbance Vegetation Anomaly (HDVA) [Data set for Turner et al.]

The Hurricane Disturbance Vegetation Anomaly (HDVA) is a rapid assessment approach to understand the severity of ecological damage from a high intensity storm event on an otherwise healthy, mature mangrove forest. Data archived here focuses on Cuba, where Hurricane Irma (Category 5) hit the northern coast in September 2017 and caused wide-spread damage to mangroves and coastal forests. Local scientists were not able to assess the full extent or severity of damages through field work due to limited infrastructure and resources, so they turned to remote sensing analysis. We developed a multitemporal, multiresolution approach to assess the damage 1) extent and 2) relative severity using changes from the typical green-leaf phenology represented by the Enhanced Vegetation Index with MODIS and Sentinel-2 data. All data was processed in Google Earth Engine API to access and utilize large amounts of historical data, as well as compare sensors’ spatial resolution impacts on results. This data set includes the HDVA products and categorization of data by quartile of damage (catastrophic, severe, moderate, mild, no loss).