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Forestry Advance Access published online on October 3, 2006
Forestry, doi:10.1093/forestry/cpl036
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© Institute of Chartered Foresters, 2006. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
Received July 27, 2006

Article

Radar remote sensing for the delineation of forest cover maps and the detection of deforestation

C. Thiel 1 *, P. Drezet 2, C. Weise 1, S. Quegan 2, and C. Schmullius 1

1 Deparment of Geography, Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena, Loebdergraben 32, 07743 Jena, Germany
2 Natural Environment Research Council Centre for Terrestrial Carbon Dynamics and the University of Sheffield, Hicks Building, Hounsfield Road, Sheffield S3 7RH, England

* To whom correspondence should be addressed.
C. Thiel, E-mail: c5thch{at}uni-jena.de


  Abstract

This paper assesses the feasibility of forest cover mapping and the delineation of deforestation using Japanese Earth Resource Satellite (JERS)-1 Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data. The assessment was carried out at five test sites in Germany (Thuringia), UK (Kielder), Sweden (Remningstorp and Brattåker) and Russia (Chunsky). These temperate and boreal sites all have high forest cover, but with different forestry management practices. The stands at the Swedish, Russian and UK sites are harvested by clear-cutting, while in Thuringia, thinning is the predominant practice. Man-made deforestation is characterized in SAR imagery by regular geometric patterns which can be segmented and classified for data analysis. This reduces the statistical effects of SAR speckle. The procedure for mapping deforested areas exploits time series of SAR images, taken from the period 1992-1998 during which JERS was operational. Two different approaches were developed. The first detects forest cover separately for each JERS scene, while the second takes all scenes into account simultaneously. Images are classified into forest, non-forest and deforested areas. The overall accuracy of the derived forest cover map is ~90 per cent in acreage and ~90 per cent for logging.


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