Open AccessAssessment of Tropical Forest Degradation with Canopy Fractional Cover from Landsat ETM+ and IKONOS Imagery
Author(s) -
Cuizhen Wang,
Jiaguo Qi,
Mark A. Cochrane
Publication year - 2005
Publication title -
earth interactions
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.309
H-Index - 38
ISSN - 1087-3562
DOI - 10.1175/ei133.1
Subject(s) - thematic mapper , canopy , environmental science , leaf area index , remote sensing , vegetation (pathology) , deforestation (computer science) , panchromatic film , tree canopy , satellite imagery , geography , ecology , multispectral image , medicine , pathology , computer science , biology , programming language , archaeology
Tropical forests are being subjected to a wide array of disturbances in addition to outright deforestation. Selective logging is one of the most common disturbances ongoing in the Amazon, which results in significant changes in forest structure and canopy integrity. Assessing forest canopy fractional cover (fc) is one way of measuring forest degradation caused by selective logging. In this study we applied a linear mixture model to a vegetation index domain to map canopy fractional cover in tropical forests in the Amazonian state of Mato Grosso, Brazil. The modified soil adjusted vegetation index (MSAVI) was selected as the optimal vegetation index in the model because it is most linearly related to green canopy abundance up to leaf area index = 4.0. In the canopy fc map derived from the Landsat Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) image, the fc distribution ranged from 0 to 0.4 in clear-cut areas, higher than 0.8 in undisturbed forests, and a wider range of 0.3–1.0 in degraded forests. The fc map was validated with the 1-m panchromatic sharpened IKONOS image. In the logged forests the ETM+ estimated fc values were clustered along the 1:1 line in the scatterplot with the IKONOS estimated fc and had a squared correlation coefficient (R2) of 0.8.