Establishing a Novel Forest Assessment Method: The Forestless Volume Indicator (NY-08-DG-296)

This proposal investigates a novel geospatial visualization and analysis methodology to assess urban forest changes. We support a detailed insight on urban forest changes by ranking spatial uniqueness of changes as opposed to surrounding spatial distribution of forests. We use a typical GIS distance transformation, the distance to nearest forest (DTF). When DTF is integrated over an area it becomes an explicit measure of non-forested space for that area, which we call forestless volume (FY). We later use FY as an indicator to facilitate comparisons between different areas and assess importance of forest loss/gain (instead of simply identify changes).

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