A New Method for Automated Clearcut Disturbance Detection in Mediterranean Coppice Forests Using Landsat Time Series

A Landsat time series has been recognized as a viable source of information for monitoring and assessing forest disturbances and for continuous reporting on forest dynamics. This study focused on developing automated procedures for detecting disturbances in Mediterranean coppice forests which are characterized by rapid regrowth after a cut. Specifically, new methods specific to Mediterranean coppice forests are needed for mapping clearcut disturbances over time and for estimating related indicators in the context of Sustainable Forest Management and Biodiversity International monitoring frameworks. The aim of this work was to develop a new change detection algorithm for mapping clearcut disturbances in Mediterranean coppice forests with Landsat time series (LTS) using a short time window. Accuracy for the new algorithm, characterized as the Two Thresholds Method (TTM), was evaluated using an independent clearcut reference dataset over a temporal period of the 13 years between 2001 and 2013. TTM was also evaluated against two benchmark approaches: (i) LandTrendr, and (ii) the forest loss category of the Global Forest Change Map. Overall Accuracy for LandTrendr and TTM were greater than 0.94. Meanwhile, smaller accuracies were always obtained for the GFC. In particular, Producer’s Accuracy ranged between 0.45 and 0.84 for TTM and between 0.49 and 0.83 for LT, while for the GFC, PA ranged between 0 and 0.38. User’s Accuracy ranged between 0.86 and 0.96 for TTM and between 0.73 and 0.91 for LT, while for the GFC UA ranged between 0.19 and 1.00. Moreover, to illustrate the utility of TTM for mapping clearcut disturbances in Mediterranean coppice forests, we applied TTM to a Landsat scene that covered almost the entirety of the Tuscany region in Italy.