Spatial and Temporal Morphological Change in Canadian Boreal Forests

Quantification and comparison of the boreal forest cover over vast extents and long periods can be challenging but holds the potential to characterize disturbance regimes and how their characteristics differ in space and time. The study of morphology and the use of join count statistics in this research enabled assessing the composition and configuration of the spatial patterns. Bootstrap resampling produced empirical distributions that facilitated the comparisons of the join count analysis outcomes among the spatial and temporal groupings. In order to statistically test the effect of spatial and temporal groupings, ANOVA and Levenes tests were used to compare means and variances of join count outcomes for each of the morphological classes, respectively. This study concludes that the spatial and temporal morphology of forest disturbance pattern within the boreal biome of Canada differ through time and among provinces and/or territories and identifies the main cases where the differences are significant.