Monitoring and mapping eastern Ontario's 1998 forest ice storm damage

Between January 4--9, 1998, a severe ice storm struck northeastern North America. Ice loading and high winds contributed to forest damage in Eastern Ontario, a region whose economy and identity depends on an intact forest resource for maple syrup production and other activities. This thesis was a component of a larger study by the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources (OMNR) to address the needs of the maple syrup industry resulting from the ice storm, including temporal monitoring of forest response to damage to assess forest treatment effects, and mapping local to regional scale forest damage for economic impact assessment and compensation. This work is divided into two parts to address each of these needs separately. Part I uses field measured optical instrument-based Leaf Area Index (LAI) as a damage indicator for local monitoring, while Part II applies pre and post-storm Landsat satellite imagery and environmental data, and interpolation of plot-based damage estimates to produce two separate forest damage maps. LAI and post storm LAI change were determined to be suitable damage indicators, being significantly related to initial visual damage estimates while changing through time to reflect LAI recovery in the majority of plots that were measured. Neural network modeling with Landsat and environmental data was 69.3% accurate in classifying low-to-moderate and high damage with 50% crown loss as the threshold between these two classes. Interpolation produced slightly higher mapping accuracies, but lower Kappa statistics due to a reduced number of plots used for validation. These maps were compared with aerial sketch and freezing precipitation maps produced by the OMNR and Environment Canada, respectively. Overall, there was little agreement among maps due to the patchy nature of forest damage and differences among assessment scales.