Early-wilted forest following the Central European 2018 extreme drought

<p><span>During the summer of 2018, Central Europe experienced the most extreme drought and heat wave on record, leading to widespread early leaf-shedding and die-offs in forest trees. We quantified such early-wilting responses by associating Sentinel-2 time-series statistics of the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index with visually classified orthophotos, using a random forest classifier. The predictions of our classifier achieved a high accuracy of 0.90 </span><span><span>±0.014 and estimated</span></span><span> the area of affected forest at </span><span><span>21'500 ±2800 km²</span></span><span>. Early wilting was especially prevalent in eastern and central Germany and in the Czech Republic and it was related to high temperatures and low precipitation at large-scales, and small to medium-sized trees, steep slopes, and shallow soils at fine-scales. The present dataset includes spatial predictons of 2018 early-wilting presence/absence for entire Central Europe (</span><em><span>c</span></em><span>. 800'000 km</span>^{<span>2</span>}<span>) at 10×10 m resolution. It may be used for high-resolution studies of early-wilting patterns, to study how factors like physiology or species identity relate to early-wilting patterns, and/or as testbed for alternative approaches quantifying water stress in forests. </span></p>