Historical tropical successional forest cover mapped with Landsat MSS imagery

Abstract

Maps of tropical successional forest cover of the 1970s and 1980s are needed for long-term modelling of tropical forest-cover change, carbon flux and habitat change. Landsat Multispectral Scanner System (MSS) imagery may provide a basis for such maps, but its capability in this respect is poorly unexplored if not discounted. This article examines how reliably single-date MSS imagery may distinguish tropical successional forest. Statistical and graphical analyses of 2043 MSS pixels of successional forest cover, pasture and mature forest cover of Central Panama indicate that successional forest may be accurately mapped, with a maximum-likelihood classification accuracy of 86–90%. Detectable successional cover is unlikely to be older than 10 years approximately. These findings indicate that MSS imagery may provide a new baseline for historical mapping and long-term modelling of tropical forest-cover change that, unlike that of Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) imagery used for this purpose, is amenable to fine-scale spatial analysis and reliable accuracy assessment.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the National Geographic Institute ‘Tommy Guardia’ of Panama, the National Authority for the Environment of Panama and the Department of Remote Sensing of the Panama Canal Authority for providing historical maps and aerial photography; to the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute for providing facilities in Panama while I undertook fieldwork and to John Richards of the Australian National University and Mohammad Abuzar of the Victorian Department of Primary Industries (Australia) for input on earlier drafts.

Notes

†The procedure described in this section was also applied to the purified model training data, but results were less interpretable than when applied to the model training data.