Extreme drought conditions in Mississippi killed approximately 12.5 million trees and over 80,000 acres affected across the state, the Mississippi Forestry Commission reported.
The United States Department of Agriculture Forest Service helped MFC conduct the survey through the Southern Research Station looking at an area of 13,010,098 acres, 2,500,000 acres were made up of pine trees. It is important to note the drought caused stress on the trees and it is likely beetles such as the Southern Pine beetle and Ips beetle attacked stressed trees and killed them.
Garron Hicks, Mississippi Forestry Commission Forest Health Commissioner, said the survey looked at 811,111 spots, or polygons reflecting pine decline, which were extracted from remote sensing analysis from sentinel 2 satellite imagery. Spots range in size from .02 acres to 72-acre areas with the majority of spots less than 20-acre polygons. The average spots were at a tenth of an acre.
Mississippi Forestry Commission determined the survey had a 96 percent confidence level by looking at the ground truth imagery of 150 random points. Hicks stated they adjusted total acreage affected from 80,415,33 using the 0.04 percent error, to 78,988.3 acres of mortality.