Evaluating satellite imagery for estimating mountain pine beetle-caused lodgepole pine mortality: Current status

Spatial accuracy in the detection and monitoring of mountain pine beetle populations is an important aspect of both forest research and management. Using ground-collected data, classification models to predict mountain pine beetle-caused lodgepole pine mortality were developed for Landsat TM, ETM+, and IKONOS imagery. Our results suggest that low-resolution imagery such as Landsat TM (30 m) is not suitable for detection of endemic level populations of mountain pine beetle. However, good results were obtained for pixels with groups of red beetle-killed lodgepole pine (> 25 trees killed per 30-m pixel), implying that Landsat imagery is most suited to detection of populations at the building or epidemic phase. Preliminary results using high resolution IKONOS imagery (4 m) suggest that detection of individual or small groups of red beetle-killed lodgepole pine can be accomplished with a relatively high accuracy.