Western spruce budworm is one of the most widespread and destructive native forest defoliators in North America. This dataset contains satellite-derived vegetation health indices for 9 forest stands in northwestern New Mexico, USA, used to detect patterns of resistance and resilience to insect outbreaks. The data was created by Kate van den Berg and last updated in May 2026.
Use Cases
- Detecting forest disturbance and recovery patterns based on annual Landsat imagery.
- Comparing the sensitivity of different vegetation indices (NDVI, MSI, PSRI) to canopy stress and defoliation.
- Analyzing the interaction between drought-related stress and insect defoliation based on spectral response data.
- Developing transferable remote sensing workflows for identifying spatial patterns of forest resilience.
Strengths
- Analyzes 9 distinct forest stands across a geographic area.
- Compares three specific vegetation health indices (NDVI, MSI, PSRI) for detecting canopy stress.
- Calculates specific resilience metrics like disturbance magnitude, regime shift ratio, and recovery rate from time-series data.
Limitations
- Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
- Row count and file size are unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
- The study area is limited to 9 stands in northwestern New Mexico, which may affect generalizability.
Provenance
- Source
- Borealis Harvested Dataverse
- Collection Method
- Annual Landsat imagery processed in Google Earth Engine to analyze vegetation health indices.
- Freshness
- Last updated 2026-05-02 04:10:48; freshness should be verified.
- Geography
- Northwestern New Mexico, USA