Mikey Mid Mohan

University of California, Berkeley | UCB · Earth System Science

Afforestation/reforestation (A/R) programs spearheaded by Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) play a significant role in reaching global climate policy targets and helping low-income nations meet the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). However, these organizations face unprecedented challenges due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Cons...

Tropical savanna ecosystems play a major role in the seasonality of the global carbon cycle. However, their ability to store and sequester carbon is uncertain due to combined and intermingling effects of anthropogenic activities and climate change, which impact wildfire regimes and vegetation dynamics. Accurate measurements of tropical savanna vege...

The frequency and intensity of flood events are increasing year by year as a result of climate change. This poses significant threats to human settlements and adversely affects biodiversity, agriculture, and infrastructure. One of the most prominent and traditional flood evacuation approaches is through the use of boats. Nonetheless, serious challe...

This study aims to measure changes in climatic factors and their relationship to vegetation growth in Qatar to develop a plant-climate characterization for native desert plants. By analyzing Landsat satellite images from 1985 to 2022 and their relation to rainfall patterns, we found significant impacts of climatic variables on vegetation coverage,...

Hurricane incidents have become increasingly frequent along the coastal United States and have had a negative impact on the mangrove forests and their ecosystem services across the southeastern region. Mangroves play a key role in providing coastal protection during hurricanes by attenuating storm surges and reducing erosion. However, their resilie...

Mangroves provide numerous ecological, social, and economic benefits that include carbon sequestration, habitat for biodiversity, food, recreation and leisure, income, and coastal resilience. In this regard, mangrove-based carbon market projects (MbCMP), involving mangrove conservation, protection, and restoration, are a nature-based solution (NbS)...

Background The objective of this study was to detect native trees from different flight configurations and smoothing techniques in Canopy Height Models (CHMs) in a native remnant in the municipality of Curitiba, State of Paraná, Brazil. To do so, eight flights were carried out with a Phantom 4, with two flight planning applications (Litchi and Pix4...

Mangrove forests are found across the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region despite challenging environmental extremes, including highly variable temperatures and hypersalinity. Understanding the biophysical and anthropogenic factors that influence mangrove forest growth is key to locate suitable areas for regeneration and afforestation activities....

In this study, mangrove conservation efforts in Qatar were reviewed based on sources - from Google Scholar, Google, Scopus, WoS, OpenAlex, and CrossRef - published from January 2010 to March 2023. The aim of this study was to assess the distribution and temporal dynamics of mangrove cover, importance/threats, research gaps, and potential opportunit...

Mangrove ecotourism is gaining immense popularity in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries as a neoliberal conservation tool, and it has contributed significantly to the growth of the tourism sector in the region over the past two decades. However, there is no comprehensive review on the full extent of mangrove ecotourism activities and the...

Mangroves in Southeast Asia provide numerous supporting, provisioning, regulating, and cultural services that are crucial to the environment and local livelihoods since they support biodiversity conservation and climate change resilience. However, Southeast Asia mangroves face deforestation threats from the expansion of commercial aquaculture, agri...

This work focuses on quantifying favorable rainfall patterns during the rainy season to help estimate the probability of receiving maximum seasonal vegetation growth and determining favorable timing for providing supplementary irrigation. Our study was conducted within the Demilitarized Zone located on the northern side of the State of Kuwait. Land...

This study aims to evaluate the performance and effectiveness of six spectral water indices-derived from Multispectral sentinel-2 data-to detect soil moisture and inundated area in arid regions to be used as an indicator of mudflow phenomena to predict high-risk areas. Herein, the validation of the performance of spectral indices was conducted usin...

Accurate measuring, mapping, and monitoring of mangrove forests support the sustainable management of mangrove blue carbon in the Asia-Pacific. Remote sensing coupled with modeling can efficiently and accurately estimate mangrove blue carbon stocks at larger spatiotemporal extents. This study aimed to identify trends in remote sensing/modeling empl...

Tropical cyclone is a natural disaster phenomenon that is considered one of the main challenges for human populations in many countries across the globe. This study investigates the Tropical Cyclone “Shaheen” that hit Oman on October 3, 2021, causing severe damage near Muscat and Al-Batinah governorates. Herein, we focused on developing an integrat...

In the last few decades, revegetation strategies for ecosystem restoration have received great attention in dryland studies, especially those related to the restoration and revegetation of native desert plants to combat land degradation. Long-term monitoring and assessment are critical for the restoration programs to track the progress of the resto...

Tropical rainforests of Latin America (LATAM) are one of the world's largest carbon sinks, with substantial future carbon sequestration potential and contributing a major proportion of the global supply of forest carbon credits. LATAM is poised to contribute predominantly towards high-quality forest carbon offset projects designed to reduce emissio...

Blue carbon habitats, including mangrove forests, salt marshes, and seagrass beds, play a crucial role in sequestering organic carbon, mitigating global warming, and protecting coastlines and local livelihoods. Traditional monitoring methods for these ecosystems are limited and expensive, leading to the adoption of remote sensing, particularly via...

Mangrove forests in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries are facing multiple threats from natural and anthropogenic-driven land use change stressors, contributing to altered ecosystem conditions. Remote sensing tools can be used to monitor mangroves, measure mangrove forest-and-tree-level attributes and vegetation indices at different spati...

Urban forests provide direct and indirect benefits to human well-being that are increasingly captured in residential property values. Remote Sensing (RS) can be used to measure a wide range of forest and vegetation parameters that allows for a more detailed and better understanding of their specific influences on housing prices. Herein, through a s...

The rapid growth of urban populations and the need for sustainable urban planning and development has made Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) a valuable tool for data collection, mapping, and monitoring. This article reviews the applications of UAV technology in sustainable urban development, particularly in Malaysia. It explores the potential of UAVs...

Protecting and enhancing forest carbon sinks is considered a natural solution for mitigating climate change. However, the increasing frequency, intensity, and duration of droughts due to climate change can threaten the stability and growth of existing forest carbon sinks. Extreme droughts weaken plant hydraulic systems, can lead to tree mortality e...

The impact of climate change-driven droughts on regenerating forests is poorly understood due to the complexities involved in regeneration processes and the difficulties in measuring the relevant parameters with sufficient spatial and temporal resolution in a timely manner. Drought increases tree mortality in both undisturbed and disturbed forests...

Harvested timber and constructed infrastructure over the logging area leave massive damage that contributes to the emission of anthropogenic gases into the atmosphere. Carbon emissions from tropical deforestation and forest degradation are the second largest source of anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases. Even though the emissions vary from...

Climate teleconnections (CT) remotely influence weather conditions in many regions on Earth, entailing changes in primary drivers of fire activity such as vegetation biomass accumulation and moisture. We reveal significant relationships between the main global CTs and burned area that vary across and within continents and biomes according to both s...

Hydrocarbon-contaminated soils are considered as one of the major environmental issues that harm human well-being, particularly in arid regions of the world. Phytoremediation is a possible mitigation measure for this issue and has been suggested as it is cost-effective compared with other remediation technologies for soil clean-up, such as soil the...

Dear Colleagues, This Special Issue aims to promote and support advancements in research activities in the domain of individual tree detection (ITD), which has benefited tremendously from the proliferation of low-cost unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and data science industry in recent years. Currently, ITD finds applications in multiple sub-sector...

Canopy height is a fundamental parameter for determining forest ecosystem functions such as biodiversity and above-ground biomass. Previous studies examining the underlying patterns of the complex relationship between canopy height and its environmental and climatic determinants suffered from the scarcity of accurate canopy height measurements at l...

Transpiration is often considered to be light- but not water-limited in humid tropical rainforests due to abundant soil water, even during the dry seasons. The record-breaking 2015-16 El Niño drought provided a unique opportunity to examine whether transpiration is constrained by water under severe lack of rainfall. We measured sap velocity, soil w...

Individual tree attributes, such as stem volume and biomass, are usually predicted by using traditional field-derived allometric models. However, these models are derived from data collected from small areas and lack a level of detail of tree components (e.g., stem, branches, and leaves). Remote sensing techniques such as the Quantitative Structure...

Lidar point clouds have been frequently used in forest inventories. The higher point density has provided better representation of trees in forest plantations. So we developed a new approach to fill this gap in the integrated crop-livestock-forest system, the sampling forest inventory, which uses the principles of individual tree detection applied...

Individual tree detection (ITD) and crown delineation are two of the most relevant methods for extracting detailed and reliable forest information from LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) datasets. However, advanced computational skills and specialized knowledge have been normally required to extract forest information from LiDAR. The development o...

Selective logging can cause significant impacts on the residual stands, affecting biodiversity and leading to environmental changes. Proper monitoring and mapping of the impacts from logging activities, such as the stumps, felled logs, roads, skid trails, and forest canopy gaps, are crucial for sustainable forest management operations. The purpose...

Quantifying fuel load over large areas is essential to support integrated fire management initiatives in fire-prone regions to preserve carbon stock, biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. It also allows a better understanding of global climate regulation as a potential carbon sink or source. Large area assessments usually require data from spaceb...

Urban trees and forests provide multiple ecosystem services (ES), including temperature regulation, carbon sequestration, and biodiversity. Interest in ES has increased amongst policymakers, scientists, and citizens given the extent and growth of urbanized areas globally. However, the methods and techniques used to properly assess biodiversity and...

The critically endangered West Pacific Ocean subpopulation of the leatherback turtles has faced a significant population decline in the past decades. One of the reasons for this is the loss of nesting habitats in the region. In this pilot study, turtle nesting habitats are remotely monitored employing satellite imageries. This methodology has been...

Tropical forests play a significant role in regulating the average global atmospheric temperature encompassing 25 % of the carbon present in the terrestrial biosphere. However, the rapid change in climate, arising from unsustainable human practices, can significantly affect their carbon uptake capability in the future. For understanding these devia...

Applications of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have proliferated in the last decade due to the technological advancements on various fronts such as structure-from-motion (SfM), machine learning, and robotics. An important preliminary step with regard to forest inventory and management is individual tree detection (ITD), which is required to calcul...

Precise assessments of forest species’ composition help analyze biodiversity patterns, estimate wood stocks, and improve carbon stock estimates. Therefore, the objective of this work was to evaluate the use of high-resolution images obtained from Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) for the identification of forest species in areas of forest regeneration...

Replanting trees helps with avoiding desertification, reducing the chances of soil erosion and flooding, minimizing the risks of zoonotic disease outbreaks, and providing ecosystem services and livelihood to the indigenous people, in addition to sequestering carbon dioxide for mitigating climate change. Consequently, it is important to explore new...

p>Simulation frameworks are necessary to facilitate decision-making to many fire agencies. An accurate estimation of fire behavior is required to analyze potential impact and risk. Applied research and technology together have improved the implementation of fire modeling, and decision-making in operational environments.</p

The high dimensionality of data generated by Unmanned Aerial Vehicle(UAV)-Lidar makes it difficult to use classical statistical techniques to design accurate predictive models from these data for conducting forest inventories. Machine learning techniques have the potential to solve this problem of modeling forest attributes from remotely sensed dat...

The palm oil industry is one of the major producers of vegetable oil in the tropics. Palm oil is used extensively for the manufacture of a wide variety of products and its production is increasing by around 9% every year, prompted largely by the expanding biofuel markets. The rise in annual demand for biofuels and vegetable oil from importer countr...

The palm oil industry is one of the major producers of vegetable oil in the tropics. Palm oil is used extensively for the manufacture of a wide variety of products and its production is increasing by around 9% every year, prompted largely by the expanding biofuel markets. The rise in annual demand for biofuels and vegetable oil from importer countr...

Fast-growing Eucalyptus spp. forest plantations and their resultant wood products are economically important and may provide a low-cost means to sequester carbon for greenhouse gas reduction. The development of advanced and optimized frameworks for estimating forest plantation attributes from lidar remote sensing data combined with statistical mode...

The wellbeing, socioeconomic viability and the associated health of the inhabitant species of any ecosystem are largely dependent on the quality of its water resources. In this regard, we developed a protocol to measure the potential impact of various environmental and anthropogenic factors on runoff quality at 22 water sampling sites across the Bu...

Papua New Guinea is a country in Oceania that hosts unique rain forests and forest ecosystems which are crucial for sequestering atmospheric carbon, conserving biodiversity, supporting the livelihood of indigenous people, and underpinning the timber market of the country. As a result of urban sprawl, agricultural expansion, and illegal logging, the...

Dear Colleagues, Recent advancements in the data processing sphere and introduction of low-cost Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) have resulted in the proliferation of *Individual Tree Algorithm* (ITD) applications in areas of forestry and conservation in the past decade. We, hereby invite authors from the broad forest remote sensing domain to consid...

Forest plantations are globally important for the economy and are significant for carbon sequestration. Properly managing plantations requires accurate information about stand timber stocks. In this study, we used the area (ABA) and individual tree (ITD) based approaches for estimating stem volume in fast-growing Eucalyptus spp forest plantations....

Accurately quantifying forest aboveground biomass (AGB) is one of the most significant challenges in remote sensing, and is critical for understanding global carbon sequestration. Here, we evaluate the effectiveness of airborne LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) for monitoring AGB stocks and change (ΔAGB) in a selectively logged tropical forest in...

Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) remote sensing has been established as one of the most promising tools for large-scale forest monitoring and mapping. Continuous advances in computational techniques, such as machine learning algorithms, have been increasingly improving our capability to model forest attributes accurately and at high spatial and...

Accurate forest parameters are essential for forest inventory. Traditionally, parameters such as diameter at breast height (DBH) and total height are measured in the field by level gauges and hypsometers. However, field inventories are usually based on sample plots, which, despite providing valuable and necessary information, are laborious, expensi...

Forest inventory and monitoring is indispensable for coconut (Cocos nucifera L.) forest plantation owners as it allows them in assessing tree growth, fruit production rates and vitality of plantations, as well as assists to meet up with the rising market demands by ensuring better yields. Nonetheless, the use of remote sensing techniques for optimi...

This study aimed to compare the effects of two modeling methods for estimating basal area in Eucalyptus forest plantation using airbone LiDAR data. The study was conducted at the municipalities of Pilar do Sul and São Miguel Arcanjo, southeast region of the state of São Paulo, Brazil, based on LiDAR and field inventory collected in a set of 158 cir...

This study aimed to compare the effects of two modeling methods for estimating basal area in Eucalyptus forest plantation using airbone LiDAR data. The study was conducted at the municipalities of Pilar do Sul and São Miguel Arcanjo, southeast region of the state of São Paulo, Brazil, based on LiDAR and field inventory collected in a set of 158 cir...

Forest Inventory and monitoring are important for coconut plantation owners as it helps them in tracking forest growth, fruit production rates, and plantation vitality. From this aspect, automated Individual Tree Detection (ITD) is very helpful as it makes the aforementioned processes less time-consuming, affordable, and efficient; however, applica...

Forest plantations cover a large part of tropical countries such as Brazil and eucalyptus plantations in particular account for 57% of Brazil's reforested area. As plantations offer multiple benefits-such as an option to offset natural forests, simplify otherwise complex forest ecosystems, meet energy, pulp, and paper demands, restore ecological se...

In forest ecosystems, many functional processes are governed by local canopy gap dynamics, caused by either natural or anthropogenic factors. Quantifying the size and spatial distribution of canopy gaps enables an improved understanding and predictive modelling of multiple environmental phenomena. For instance knowledge of canopy gap dynamics can h...

Recovery plans supported by conservation models are critical for the protection of endangered species. For developing these models, parameters are most commonly extracted via field survey or remote sensing based methods. However,at times, these models get narrowed down to specific habitat features associated with naturally occurring ecosystems, and...

The GapForestR package provides functions to i) automate canopy gaps detection, ii) compute a series of forest canopy gap statistics, including gap-size frequency distributions, iii) map gap dynamics (when multi-temporal ALS data are available), and iv) convert the data among spatial formats. CRAN: https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/ForestGap...