Continuous Detection of Forest Loss in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia Using Sentinel-1 Data

Archive ouverte

Mermoz, Stéphane | Bouvet, Alexandre | Koleck, Thierry | Ballère, Marie | Le Toan, Thuy

Edité par CCSD ; MDPI -

International audience. In this study, we demonstrate the ability of a new operational system to detect forest loss at a large scale accurately and in a timely manner. We produced forest loss maps every week over Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos (>750,000 km2 in total) using Sentinel-1 data. To do so, we used the forest loss detection method based on shadow detection. The main advantage of this method is the ability to avoid false alarms, which is relevant in Southeast Asia where the areas of forest disturbance may be very small and scattered and detection is used for alert purposes. The estimated user accuracy of the forest loss map was 0.95 for forest disturbances and 0.99 for intact forest, and the estimated producer’s accuracy was 0.90 for forest disturbances and 0.99 for intact forest, with a minimum mapping unit of 0.1 ha. This represents an important step forward compared to the values achieved by previous studies. We also found that approximately half of forest disturbances in Cambodia from 2018 to 2020 occurred in protected areas, which emphasizes the lack of efficiency in the protection and conservation of natural resources in protected areas. On an annual basis, the forest loss areas detected using our method are found to be similar to the estimations from Global Forest Watch. These results highlight the fact that this method provides not only quick alerts but also reliable detections that can be used to calculate weekly, monthly, or annual forest loss statistics at a national scale.

Suggestions

Du même auteur

SAR data for tropical forest disturbance alerts in French Guiana: Benefit over optical imagery

Archive ouverte | Ballère, Marie | CCSD

International audience. French Guiana forests cover 8 million hectares. With 98% of emerged land covered by forests, French Guiana is the area with the highest proportion of forest cover in the world. These forests ...

Use of the SAR Shadowing Effect for Deforestation Detection with Sentinel-1 Time Series

Archive ouverte | Bouvet, Alexandre | CCSD

International audience. To detect deforestation using Earth Observation (EO) data, widely used methods are based on the detection of temporal changes in the EO measurements within the deforested patches. In this pap...

Submonthly Assessment of Temperate Forest Clear-Cuts in Mainland France

Archive ouverte | Mermoz, Stéphane | CCSD

International audience. Remote sensing satellites allow large-scale and fast detections of forest loss. Operational forest loss detection systems have been mainly developed over tropical forests; however, it is incr...

Chargement des enrichissements...