Analysis of Forest Deforestation and its Driving Factors in Myanmar from 1988 to 2017

Abstract

Myanmar, abundant in natural resources, is one of the countries with high forest cover in Southeast Asia. Along with its rapid socio-economic development, however, the construction of large-scale infrastructure, expansion of agricultural land, and an increasing demand for timber products have posed serious threats to the forests and significantly affected regional sustainable development. However, the geographical environment in Myanmar is complex, resulting in the lack of long-term sequence of land cover data products. Based on 30 years’ Landsat satellite remote sensing imagery data and the land cover data extracted by a mixed classification method, this paper examined the spatial and temporal evolution characteristics of forest cover in Myanmar and investigated driving factors of the spatio-temporal evolution. Results show that the forest cover has decreased by 110,621 km2 in the past 30 years with the annual deforestation rate of 0.87%. Cropland expansion is the main reason for the deforestation throughout the study period. The study can provide basic information of the forest cover data to the Myanmar government for ecological environment protection. At the same time, it can provide important support to the “Belt and Road” initiative to invest in the region’s economy.

Assessing the Importance of Tree Cover Threshold for Forest Cover Mapping Derived from Global Forest Cover in Myanmar

“…The respective number of sample points calculated by the tool for the five ecological zones are shown in Table 1; sample points were randomly distributed in each ecological zone. There are various approaches to collecting reference data, such as field survey data [19,36], Google Earth [10,20,[37][38][39][40][41][42][43], and very high resolution satellite images, like Aerial photo, GeoEye, and QuickBird [44,45]. In this study, Collect Earth, which is a free open-source software designed to facilitate data collection for land cover monitoring [46], was used to interpret forest and non-forest from the samples for the ground situation ( Figure 2).…”

Land use and land cover changes along the China-Myanmar Oil and Gas pipelines – Monitoring infrastructure development in remote conflict-prone regions

“…This equates to a total decline of 11.8 million ha of forests in 70 years. Annually, forest coverage has declined by 0.3% during 1990s and 2000s [24].and during 1988 to 2017, the annual deforestation rate was reported as being 0.87% [25], the difference being explained by afforestation efforts. The impact of increased energy development pressures on forests and other land cover types, as well as wildlife, are largely unknown and undocumented.…”

Exploring Nasa’s Harmonized Landsat and Sentinel-2 (Hls) Dataset to Monitor Deforestation in the Amazon Rainforest

“…As the public awareness of deforestation rises, more research is conducted and more projects on deforestation monitoring are initiated (Grinand et al, 2013;Hamunyela et al, 2016;Brown et al, 2016;Cabral et al, 2018;Yang et al, 2019;Schultz et al, 2018). A variety of images from several earth observation projects as well as different combinations of methods and indices were tested in these studies.…”

“…For example, Yang et al (2019) analysed deforestation and its driving factors in Myanmar's rainforest. To determine land use and land cover classifications, the authors analysed Landsat images with 30m spatial resolution from 1988 to 2017.…”