Paper Info
Title
The Impact of Hurricane Maria on the Vegetation of Dominica and Puerto Rico Using Multispectral Remote Sensing.
Abstract
As the worst natural disaster on record in Dominica and Puerto Rico, Hurricane Maria in September 2017 had a large impact on the vegetation of these islands. In this paper, multitemporal Landsat 8 OLI and Sentinel-2 data are used to investigate vegetation damage on Dominica and Puerto Rico by Hurricane Maria, and related influencing factors are analyzed. Moreover, the changes in the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) in the year 2017 are compared to reference years (2015 and 2016). The results show that (1) there is a sudden drop in NDVI values after Hurricane Maria's landfall (decreased about 0.2) which returns to near normal vegetation after 1.5 months; (2) different land cover types have different sensitivities to Hurricane Maria, whereby forest is the most sensitive type, then followed by wetland, built-up, and natural grassland; and (3) for Puerto Rico, the vegetation damage is highly correlated with distance from the storm center and elevation. For Dominica, where the whole island is within Hurricane Maria's radius of maximum wind, the vegetation damage has no obvious relationship to elevation or distance. The study provides insight into the sensitivity and recovery of vegetation after a major land-falling hurricane, and may lead to improved vegetation protection strategies.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.3390/rs10060827
REMOTE SENSING
Keywords
Field
DocType
Hurricane Maria,vegetation index,vegetation damage,time series,satellite data
Physical geography,Vegetation,Remote sensing,Grassland,Storm,Wetland,Normalized Difference Vegetation Index,Multispectral pattern recognition,Elevation,Geology,Land cover
Journal
Volume
Issue
Citations 
10
6
2
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.51
5
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Tangao Hu1153.24
Ronald B. Smith220.51