With Hurricane Preparedness Week kicking off today, University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences researchers are preparing for hurricane season with state-of-the-art monitoring equipment that will help them determine how extensively forests are damaged during individual hurricanes.
When hurricanes careen through Florida, they not only damage homes and businesses but also destroy forests and timber farms. Getting an accurate assessment of how much timber is damaged by hurricanes is essential for environmental management decisions, salvaging logging operations, tree farms’ insurance estimates, and climate change studies, but so far, it’s been a vexing puzzle.
Carlos Silva, assistant professor of quantitative forest science in the UF/IFAS School of Forest, Fisheries, and Geomatics Sciences and director of the forest biometrics, remote sensing, and AI lab, said the key is to use a combination of remote sensing and artificial intelligence technologies, to create pre- and post-hurricane 3D maps of forests to evaluate forest loss. He uses satellites and lidar – a technology that uses lasers to collect data and which stands for Light Detection and Ranging – ground equipment to achieve this.
“Hurricanes pose a fundamental challenge for us in Florida,” Silva said. “The traditional way to assess the impact of hurricanes is basically going to the field, establishing plots, and measuring trees. But if we’re thinking about large areas, it’s really time-consuming. Therefore, the traditional way of assessing the impact of hurricanes on forest ecosystems is not efficient.”
“We are in a new era for monitoring forests, thanks to these innovative remote-sensing and AI methods,” he said.
He said data help emergency managers and environmental managers make fast, smart decisions in the aftermath of a hurricane. These data help them know which areas were most affected and needed help immediately, as well as which would benefit from specialized action at a later time—such as where to do salvage logging operations.
Kody Brock, a senior in Silva’s lab, said the maps can help forest managers and landowners alike react quickly to hurricane damage.
“Hurricanes are only going to get worse and more frequent,” she said, “and we realize that in the field of forestry. Those are ecosystems we’re losing.”
According to Colorado State University’s hurricane forecasting team, hurricane season 2024 is shaping up to be an active one. The team is forecasting 23 storms. Of that, 11 will be hurricanes, and five will be Category 3 or stronger.
Silva and his lab used NASA satellites, specifically the Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) satellite and the Ice, Cloud, and Land Elevation Satellite (ICESat-2), to scan trees on the ground with a laser pulse that sends back data on the forest's structure.
Additional data are collected with ground-based lidar scanners attached to all-terrain vehicles and a backpack apparatus to make high-resolution 3D maps of the forest.
The lidar and imagery data from satellites and ground-based sensors are combined into a web-based mapping platform that shows a comprehensive picture of Hurricane Ian's ecosystem impacts on the fore. The map is available online for anyone to use.
He said the data coming back from these sources includes the weight of trees before and after hurricanes, as well as 3D images of trees that can spot small changes like individual broken tree limbs.
“There was no way to combine data from different sources – until now,” Silva said of his lab’s innovations.
Silva’s research is funded by the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) through the Rapid Response to Extreme Weather Events Across Food and Agricultural Systems program.
Silva’s team also included postdoctoral researchers Inacio Bueno and Caio Hamamura and Ph.D. student Monique Schlickmann.
ABOUT UF/IFAS
The mission of the University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (UF/IFAS) is to develop knowledge relevant to agricultural, human, and natural resources and to make that knowledge available to sustain and enhance the quality of human life. With more than a dozen research facilities, 67 county Extension offices, and award-winning students and faculty in the UF College of Agricultural and Life Sciences, UF/IFAS brings science-based solutions to the state’s agricultural and natural resources industries and all Florida residents.
For more information, go to ifas.ufl.edu.
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