Forest logging detection is important for sustainable forest management. The traditional optical satellite images with visible and near-infrared bands showed the ability to identify intensive timber logging. However, less intensive logging is still difficult to detect with coarse spatial resolution such as Landsat or high spatial resolution in fewer spectral bands. Although more high-resolution remote sensing images containing richer spectral bands can be easily obtained nowadays, the questions of whether they facilitate the detection of logging patterns and which spectral bands are more effective in detecting logging patterns, especially in selective logging, remain unresolved. Therefore, this paper aims to evaluate the combinations of visible, near-infrared, red-edge, and short-wave infrared bands in detecting three different logging intensity patterns, including unlogged (control check, CK), selective logging (SL), and clear-cutting (CC), in north subtropical plantation forests with the random forest algorithm using Sentinel-2 multispectral imagery. This study aims to explore the recognition performance of different combinations of spectral bands (visual (VIS) and near-infrared bands (NIR), VIS, NIR combined with red-edge, VIS, NIR combined with short-wave infrared bands (SWIR), and full-spectrum bands combined with VIS, NIR, red edge and SWIR) and to determine the best spectral variables to be used for identifying logging patterns, especially in SL. The study was conducted in Taizishan in Hubei province, China. A total of 213 subcompartments of different logging patterns were collected and the random forest algorithm was used to classify logging patterns. The results showed that full-spectrum bands which contain the red-edge and short-wave infrared bands improve the ability of conventional optical satellites to monitor forest logging patterns and can achieve an overall accuracy of 85%, especially for SL which can achieve 79% and 64% for precision and recall accuracy, respectively. The red-edge band (698–713 nm, B5 in Sentinel-2), short-wave infrared band (2100–2280 nm, B12 in Sentinel-2), and associated vegetation indices (NBR, NDre2, and NDre1) enhance the sensitivity of the spectral information to logging patterns, especially for the SL pattern, and the precision and recall accuracy can improve by 10% and 6%, respectively. Meanwhile, both clear-cutting and unlogged patterns could be well-classified whether adding a red-edge or SWIR band or both in VIS and NIR bands; the best precision and recall accuracies for clear-cutting were enhanced to 97%, 95% and 81%, 91% for unlogged, respectively. Our results demonstrate that the optical images have the potential ability to detect logging patterns especially for the clear-cutting and unlogged patterns, and the selective logging detection accuracy can be improved by adding red-edge and short-wave infrared spectral bands.
