Land use monitoring by remote sensing in tropical forest areas in support of the Kyoto Protocol: the case of French Guiana

Abstract

The new SPOT/Envisat direct receiving station (DRS) operating in Cayenne in the framework of the SEAS-Guyane project was used to produce a global cloudless SPOT mosaic over French Guiana for the year 2006. This mosaic was used to perform a land-use, land-use change and forestry (LULUCF) inventory in the framework of the Kyoto Protocol. Nearly 17 000 sample points were laid down on the SPOT mosaic with a stratified sampling design. The land use at each sample point was determined by visual interpretation of the corresponding SPOT image in 2006 and the Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) image from the Global Land Cover Facility (GLCF) in 1990. Statistics for the period 1990-2006 were computed and integrated in the first voluntary Kyoto inventory.

Time-series analysis of multi-resolution optical imagery for quantifying forest cover loss in Sumatra and Kalimantan, Indonesia

“…Compositing has been used with moderate spatial resolution imagery to provide gap-free representations of the land surface over large areas in Central Africa (Hansen et al, 2008b, Lindquist et al, 2008, French Guyana (Stach et al, 2009), the Caribbean (Helmer and Ruefenacht, 2005), the lower 48 states of the USA (Roy et al, 2010) and Antarctica (Bindschadler et al, 2008). In this work, we considered all cloud and shadow-free observations acquired over specific intervals as inputs for composites and employed a median value Landsat band 5 (short wave infrared) compositing rule.…”

Estimating deforestation in tropical humid and dry forests in Madagascar from 2000 to 2010 using multi-date Landsat satellite images and the random forests classifier

“…This method of detecting change has been widely used (Harper et al, 2007;Stach et al, 2009) and provides useful transition matrices describing change from one land category at date 1 to another land category at date 2 (Duveiller et al, 2008;Huang et al, 2009). But when two single date maps are used in combination to derive land cover change, individual errors will be multiplied if errors on the two maps are assumed to be independent (Fuller, Smith, & Devereux, 2003).…”

“…Point sampling reduces the operational cost of exhaustive analysis of a large number of satellite images, while improving the thematic accuracy of (for example) regrowth or degradation assessment by focusing on small areas (Achard et al, 2002;Duveiller, Defourny, Desclée, & Mayaux, 2008;FRA, 2010;Rasi et al, 2011;Stach et al, 2009). However, the accuracy of point sampling is closely linked to the quality of the sampling design (Steininger et al, 2009) and does not enable the production of deforestation maps of the entire forest area.…”

Monitoring forest areas from continental to territorial levels using a sample of medium spatial resolution satellite imagery

“…The IFN survey is needed under the Kyoto Protocol rules. This official method to report on forest cover changes uses a sample size of approximately 17,000 'plots' of 1 ha size each (covering 0.1% of territory) for which imagery from medium resolution spatial imagery have been acquired between year 1990 (Landsat TM at 30 m × 30 m resolution) and year 2006 (SPOT HRVIR) and interpreted visually (Stach et al, 2009). This specific sampling design is derived from traditional forest field inventory methods and is designed to provide highly precise and accurate estimates.…”