Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Climatic influences on changing landcover, water availability and biomass production are components of a dynamic Earth System that can be monitored with satellite earth observation (EO) data. EO land and water monitoring and regional climate modeling are becoming commonplace tools to support government resource, hazard and environmental assessments, and for land/water use and Carbon emissions policy. The increasing reliance on EO data to understand, manage and plan societal interaction with the Environment has resulted in many recent or imminent satellite launches with goals of monitoring global biomass to water extent and levels. A challenge with satellite EO data is converting images into meaningful representations of ground level feature properties and then relating image-based changes to ecosystem processes. My Dynamic Ecosystem Landcover Transitions Assessment (DELTA) program uses multi-scale EO data to examine forest and wetland ecosystem response to perturbations in the climate system along elevation and latitude gradients. High latitude and mountain regions contain forest ecosystems at the extent of their natural range that are sensitive to hydroclimatic change. Some areas have experienced >2oC increase in recent annual temperatures, resulting in clear impacts on forest productivity. Few studies have examined spatio-temporal impacts of climate forcing on morpho-biophysical ecosystem characteristics across transitional (e.g. treeline) forest ecotones. It is often assumed that as high altitude and latitude environments warm, conditions favour increased biomass production. However, local-scale feedbacks can counter the influence of regional forcing mechanisms such that aggregate contemporary and future impacts are uncertain and need to be ascertained. By combining field and multi-scale airborne and satellite EO data over 6 study sites, DELTA will characterize the rates and magnitudes of change occurring to landcover, water availability and biomass production within Montane, Boreal and Taiga Ecozone transition zones. Results will be summarized at the region, landscape, ecosystem and local feature scales. Regional impacts need to be understood to inform policy, while feature-scale data enable processes understanding and modeling. Consequently, focus will be placed on developing routines to upscale feature-scale processes and on downscaling regional EO change observations. Understanding the scaling behavior of processes and observations will be used to develop a GIS-based landscape evolution modelling framework. This research will ensure modern EO data are seen as reliable inputs to policy and management processes. This has great importance for public and private sector stakeholders that are responsible for stewardship and sustainable resource extraction, management and reclamation in regions sensitive to hydroclimatic change.