Mountain pine beetle detection and monitoring: replication trials for early detection

Abstract

This paper reports replication results from a two year study to acquire, process and evaluate digitally converted aerial photographic imagery for the detection and monitoring of mountain pine beetle (MPB) infestations. In 2002/03 we demonstrated that it was possible to reliably detect a spreading MPB infestation at six different sites by late May early June. These results were supported by detailed ground truth and high resolution imagery that permitted the identification of individual trees at a crown resolution of up to 10cm pixels (>2000 pixels/crown). Our 2002 initial results were fully confirmed by our 2003 multispectral and colour negative imagery and hybrid supervised classification procedures. It is our opinion that this procedure should be taken to the operational trial phase to evaluate the performance of these imaging and classification procedures in a working context.