Forest Habitat Fragmentation in Mountain Protected Areas Using Historical Corona KH-9 and Sentinel-2 Satellite Imagery

Abstract

Forest habitat fragmentation is one of the global environmental issues of concern as a result of forest management practices and socioeconomic drivers. In this context, a constant evaluation of natural habitat conditions still remains a challenge in order to achieve a general image of the environmental state of a protected area for proper sustainable management. The purpose of our study was to evaluate the evolution of forest habitat in the last 40 years, focusing on Bucegi Natural Park, one of the most frequented protected areas in Romania, as relevant for highly human-impacted areas. Our approach integrates a historical panchromatic Corona KH-9 image from 1977 and present-day Sentinel-2 multispectral data from 2020 in order to calculate a series of spatial metrics that reveal changes in the pattern of the forest habitat and illustrate forest habitat fragmentation density. Object-based oriented analysis with supervised maximum likelihood classification was employed for the production of forest cover fragmentation maps. Ten landscape metrics were adapted to the analysis context, from patch statistics to proximity index. The results show a general growth of the forest surface but also an increase in habitat fragmentation in areas where tourism was developed. Fragmentation indices explain that larger and compact patches feature natural park protected forests after the spruce–fir secondary canopies were grown during the last 4–5 decades. The number of patches decreased to half, and their average size is double that of before. The method can be of extensive use for environmental monitoring in protected areas management and for understanding the environmental history connected to present-day problems that are to be fixed under rising human pressure.

Monitoring vegetation- and geodiversity with remote sensing and traits

“…The frequency of image acquisition varies with the spatial resolution of the sensors. Daily images are acquired by the MODIS system remote sensing -spectral fingerprint of vegetation diversity [36]). (d) Taxonomic diversity of vegetation: classification of tree species using triple-wavelength ALS in a temperate forest (from Amiri et al [37]).…”

“…Site-specific lambda spectra are shown (grey bars) as measures of band importance for each trait model (from McManus et al [35]). (c) Structural diversity of vegetation: Bucegi Natural Park forest habitat fragmentation maps 2020 derived from Sentinel 2-MSI imagery (from Olariu et al[36]). (d) Taxonomic diversity of vegetation: classification of tree species using triple-wavelength ALS in a temperate forest (from Amiri et al[37]).…”

Geotourism, a New Perspective of Post-COVID-19-Pandemic Relaunch through Travel Agencies—Case Study: Bucegi Natural Park, Romania

“…It represents for researchers a very interesting area from the point of view of studying the flora and fauna [131]. Bucegi Natural Park represents one of the best-known protected areas in Romania, as it is important also for the nearby areas that have been intensely damaged by the human impact on the natural environment [132]. Bucegi Natural Park is a unit administered by the National Council of Forests-Romsilva.…”

Using CORONA Imagery to Study Land Use and Land Cover Change—A Review of Applications

“…Due to the availability of CORONA imagery since 1995, many researchers used the data to study various environmental processes [23], for instance, past land cover in the Caucasus Mountains [24], forest habitat fragmentation in the Bucegi Mountains, Romania [25], and post-agricultural forest succession in the Carpathian mountains [26]. In many studies, CORONA images were used jointly with other geospatial data to assess changes in land use and land cover (LULC) since the 1960s [27,28], with several studies reporting substantial difficulties when processing the data [6,29,30].…”