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Deforestation is the primary driver of carbon losses in tropical forests, but it does not operate alone. Forest fragmentation, a resulting feature of the deforestation process, promotes indirect carbon losses induced by edge effect. This process is not implicitly considered by policies for reducing carbon emissions in the tropics. Here, we used a remote sensing approach to estimate carbon losses driven by edge effect in Amazonia over the 2001 to 2015 period. We found that carbon losses associated with edge effect (947 Tg C) corresponded to one-third of losses from deforestation (2592 Tg C). Despite a notable negative trend of 7 Tg C year-1 in carbon losses from deforestation, the carbon losses from edge effect remained unchanged, with an average of 63 ± 8 Tg C year-1 Carbon losses caused by edge effect is thus an additional unquantified flux that can counteract carbon emissions avoided by reducing deforestation, compromising the Paris Agreement's bold targets.

Forest degradation in the Brazilian Amazon due to selective logging and forest fires may greatly increase the human footprint beyond outright deforestation. We demonstrate a method to quantify annual deforestation and degradation simultaneously across the entire region for the years 2000-2010 using high-resolution Landsat satellite imagery. Combining spectral mixture analysis, normalized difference fraction index, and knowledge-based decision tree classification, we mapped and assessed the accuracy to quantify forest (0.97), deforestation (0.85) and forest degradation (0.82) with an overall accuracy of 0.92. We show that 169,074 km2 of Amazonian forest was converted to human-dominated land uses, such as agriculture, from 2000 to 2010. In that same time frame, an additional 50,815 km2 of forest was directly altered by timber harvesting and/or fire, equivalent to 30% of the area converted by deforestation. While average annual outright deforestation declined by 46% between the first and second halves of the study period, annual forest degradation increased by 20%. Existing operational monitoring systems (PRODES: Monitoramento da Florestal Amazônica Brasileira por Satélite) report deforestation area to within 2% of our results, but do not account for the extensive forest degradation occurring throughout the region due to selective logging and forest fire. Annual monitoring of forest degradation across tropical forests is critical for developing land management policies as well as the monitoring of carbon stocks/emissions and protected areas.. © 2013 by the authors.

The dynamic change and spatial–temporal distribution of vegetation coverage are of great significance for regional ecological evolution, especially in the subtropics and tropics. Identifying the heterogeneity in vegetation activities and its response to climate factors is crucial for projecting ecosystem dynamics. We used long-term (2001–2018) satellite-derived enhanced vegetation index (EVI) datasets and climatic factors to analyze the spatiotemporal patterns of vegetation activities in an experimental area in Guangdong Province (China), as well as their links to changes in temperature (TEM), relative humidity (HUM), precipitation (PRE), sunshine duration (SUN), and surface runoff. The pruned exact linear time change point detection method (PELT) and the disturbance lag model (DLM) were used to understand the detailed ecological coverage status and time lag relationships between the EVI and climatic factors. The results indicate the following. (1) At the whole regional scale, a significant overall upward trend in the EVI variation was observed in 2001–2018. More specifically, there were two distinct periods with different trends, which were split by a turning point in 2005. PRE was the main climate-related driver of the rising EVI pre-2005, and the increase in TEM was the main climate factor influencing the forest EVI variation post-2006. (2) A three-month time lag effect was observed in the EVI response to relative humidity. The same phenomenon was found in the sunshine duration factor. (3) The EVI of farmlands (one type of land use) exhibited the largest lags between relative humidity and the sunshine duration factor, followed by grasslands and forests. (4) The comprehensive index of surface runoff could explain the time lags of vegetation activities, and the surface runoff value showed an apparently negative relationship with the vegetation coverage change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Land consumption is the increase in artificial land cover, which is a major issue for environmental sustainability. In Italy, the Italian Institute for Environmental Protection and Research (ISPRA) and National System for Environmental Protection (SNPA) have the institutional duty to monitor land consumption yearly, through the photointerpretation of high-resolution images. This study intends to develop a methodology in order to produce maps of land consumption, by the use of the semi-automatic classification of multitemporal images, to reduce the effort of photointerpretation in detecting real changes. The developed methodology uses vegetation indices calculated over time series of images and decision rules. Three variants of the methodology were applied to detect the changes that occurred in Italy between the years 2018 and 2019, and the results were validated using ISPRA official data. The results show that the produced maps include large commission errors, but thanks to the developed methodology, the area to be photointerpreted was reduced to 7300 km2 (2.4% of Italian surface). The third variant of the methodology provided the highest detection of changes: 70.4% of the changes larger than 100 m2 (the pixel size) and over 84.0% of changes above 500 m2. Omissions are mainly related to single pixel changes, while larger changes are detected by at least one pixel in most of the cases. In conclusion, the developed methodology can improve the detection of land consumption, focusing photointerpretation work over selected areas detected automatically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Boreal forest areas in the Russian Far East contained very large intact forests. This particular area is considered one of the most productive and diverse forests in the boreal biome of the world, and it is also home to many endangered species. Zeya State Nature Reserve is located at the southern margin of the boreal forest area in the Russian Far East and has rich fauna and flora. However, the forest in the region faced large-scale forest fires and clearcutting for timber recently. The information of disturbances is rarely understood. This study aimed to explore the effects of disturbance and forest dynamics around the reserve. Our study used two-year overlaid Landsat images from Landsat 5 Thematic Mapper (TM) and 8 Operational Land Imager (OLI), to generate forest-cover-change maps of 1988–1999, 1999–2010, and 2010–2016. In this paper, we analyze the direction of forest successional stages, to demonstrate the effectiveness of this protected area in terms of preventing human-based deforestation on the vegetation indices. The vegetation indices included the normalized burn ratio (NBR), the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), and the normalized difference water index (NDWI). The study provided information on the pattern of forest-cover change and disturbance area around the reserve. The NDWI was used to differentiate between water and non-water areas. The mean values of NBR and NDVI were calculated and determine the forest successional stages between burn, vegetation recovery, grass, mixed forest, oak forest, and birch and larch forest. The accuracy was assessed by using field measurements, field photos, and high-resolution images as references. Overall, our classification results have high accuracy for all three periods. The most disturbed area occurred during 2010–2016. The reserve was highly protected, with no human-disturbance activity. However, large areas from fire disturbance were found (137 km2) during 1999–2010. The findings also show a large area of disturbance, mostly located outside of the reserve. Mixed disturbance increased to almost 50 km2 during 2010–2016, in the buffer zone and outside of the reserve. We recommend future works to apply our methods to other ecosystems, to compare the forest dynamics and disturbance inside and outside the protected area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Assessment of the spatio-temporal dynamics of shifting cultivation is important to understand the opportunities for land restoration. The past studies on shifting cultivation mapping of North-East (NE) India lack systematic assessment techniques. We have developed a decision tree-based multi-step threshold (DTMT) method for consistent and long-term mapping of shifting cultivation using Landsat data from 1975 to 2018. Widely used vegetation indices such as normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), Normalized Burn Ratio (NBR) and its relative difference NBR (RdNBR) were integrated with the suitable thresholds in the classification, which yielded overall accuracy above 85%. A significant decrease in total shifting cultivation area was observed with an overall reduction of 75% from 1975–1976 to 2017–2018. The methodology presented in this study is reproducible with minimal inputs and can be useful to map similar changes by optimizing the index threshold values to accommodate relative differences for other landscapes. Furthermore, the crop-suitability maps generated by incorporating climate and soil factors prioritizes suitable land use of shifting cultivation plots. The Google Earth Engine (GEE) platform was employed for automatic mapping of the shifting cultivation areas at desired time intervals for facilitating seamless dissemination of the map products. Besides the novel DTMT method, the shifting cultivation and crop-suitability maps generated in this study, can aid in sustainable land management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]