Land Cover Change Mapping of the Mekong River Basin Using NOAA Pathfinder AVHRR 8-km Land Dataset

The objective of this study was to produce land cover maps for the period between 1982 and 2000 using the Normalized Differential Vegetation Index (NDVI) data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Pathfinder Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) 8-km land dataset for monitoring forest cover changes in the Mekong River basin. Time-series analysis, named Local Maximum Fitting with Kalman Filter (LMF-KF), was applied to the NDVI data to remove noise such as clouds and produce cloudfree images at 10-day intervals. Multitemporal metrics such as annual mean, maximum, minimum, standard deviation, and range were calculated using LMF-KF-processed NDVI data. Classification was performed to produce land cover maps based on signatures from the multitemporal metrics of the NDVI time-series data. The GLC2000 land cover database produced by the Joint Research Center of the European Commission was used as training data for the first classification, which is for the year 2000. Then, the results of the first classification were used as training data for the next classification, which is the previous year. Consequently, classification results for the period between 1982 and 2000 were obtained. It was found that the total forested area was stable in the classification images, whereas the proportion of deciduous forest area had increased.