Using MODIS NDVI to detect forest damage caused by 2008 ice-snow disaster in south China

An unusually severe ice-snow disaster covered a wide range of southern China in early 2008, causing significant losses to the subtropical forest resources in China and seriously threatened to the stability of forest ecosystem. Rapidly and accurately delineating the forest damage is of great importance for preventing this disaster occurs again and forest resource management.

The 2008 ice and snow storm event in southern China is an unprecedented disaster, both in time and in space. After the event, a number of field surveys have been undertaken to investigate the damage to the forest land cover. However, systematic delineation patches of the ice and snow damage to forest at a regional scale is still missing. Therefore, in this project, the spatial distribution of forest damage affected by ice-snow disaster is extracted for ten provinces in southern China, which include Hunan, Jiangxi, Hubei, Anhui, Guizhou, Zhejiang,Guangdong, Chongqing, Guangxi and Fujian Province.

The Fig.1 shows the spatial distribution of forest damage caused by ice-snow disaster, it can be found that the damaged forests are mainly distributed in Hunan, Jiangxi, eastern Guizhou and northeastern Guangxi Provice. What's more, to more explicitly describe the forest damage, the rates of damaged forest are computed for each province (see Tab.1). Hunan and Jiangxi Province are the worst areas about forest hitting by ice-snow disaster, the forest damaging rates of which are 41.03% and 34.89%, respectively. According to the Tab.1 statistical result, there is about 17.6×106hm2 forest damage affected by the 2008 ice-snow disaster, the damage rate of which is reach 19.62%.

The information is provided by the DRR Knowledge Service System of IKCEST.