Disturbance is a key component of boreal-forest ecosystems, impacting their structure and functions. In Alberta, disturbances are both natural and anthropogenic, including > 30,000 sqkm of harvest areas. The recovery of all types of forest disturbance influences not only local landscapes, but also carbon dynamics and biodiversity. In the face of a changing climate, the impacts of phenomena such as drought and severe weather on recovery trajectories will be increasingly significant and uncertain, as their intensity and frequency continue to grow.

Remotely-sensed data have played a critical role in monitoring forest disturbance and recovery processes in recent years. Today, long-term monitoring, analysis, and validation of post-disturbance recovery over large areas have become achievable via publicly available satellite data streams (e.g., Landsat) and cloud-based computing platforms such as Google Earth Engine (GEE). The Alberta Biodiversity Monitoring Institute (ABMI) has leveraged these tools to create public datasets of spectrally-based recovery metrics for Alberta forest harvest areas. Drawing on published methods and implementing them in GEE, the ABMI produced an Alberta-wide information product that highlights both regional and local variations in the post-disturbance recovery of forest vegetation spectral signals, which relate to gains in vegetation biomass and moisture. Preliminary work has shown promise for similar characterizations of recovery on other human footprint features like well sites, and further work is aimed at benefiting from recent lidar data acquisitions to develop tools supporting the satellite-based monitoring of vegetation recovery progress of industrial disturbances.