Modeling watershed-scale historic change in the alpine treeline ecotone using random forest

Abstract

Historic changes in Alpine Treeline Ecotone were modeled using 21 topographic, climatic, geologic, and disturbance variables in a random forest model. Airborne LiDAR and oblique historic repeat photography were used to identify changes in canopy cover in the West Castle Watershed (WCW), Alberta, Canada (49.3° N, 114.4° W). A Random Forest model was trained on ∼30% of the watershed which was observable in oblique imagery, then used for a spatial extension to predict change classes in the unobserved regions of the watershed. Overall accuracy of the model was 77.3% and kappa showed moderate agreement at 0.56. The relative strength of each prediction variable was compared using permutation importance. Fire exposure, annual temperature, and annual solar radiation were the highest-ranking variables; canopy cover decreases on warm, fire-exposed aspects at high elevations, and increases on cool, non-fire-exposed aspects.