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Monitoring selective logging with Landsat satellite imagery reveals that protected forests in Western Siberia experience greater harvest than non-protected forests

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 January 2017

ALEXANDER SHCHUR*
Affiliation:
SILVIS Lab, Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1630 Linden Drive, Madison, WI 53706, USA Institute for Water and Environmental Problems, Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 1 Molodyoznaya St., Barnaul 656038, Altai Krai, Russia
EUGENIA BRAGINA
Affiliation:
SILVIS Lab, Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1630 Linden Drive, Madison, WI 53706, USA Department of Forestry and Natural Resources, North Carolina State University, 127 David Clark Labs, Raleigh, NC 27695-7617, USA
ANIKA SIEBER
Affiliation:
Department of Geography, Humboldt-University of Berlin, Unter den Linden 6, 10099 Berlin, Germany
ANNA M. PIDGEON
Affiliation:
SILVIS Lab, Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1630 Linden Drive, Madison, WI 53706, USA
VOLKER C. RADELOFF
Affiliation:
SILVIS Lab, Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1630 Linden Drive, Madison, WI 53706, USA
*
*Correspondence: Alexander Shchur e-mail: alexander.shchur.1985@gmail.ru
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Summary

When timber harvesting is an important source of local income and forest resources are declining, even forests that are designated as protected areas may become vulnerable. Therefore, regular monitoring of forest disturbance is necessary to enforce the protection of forest ecosystems. However, mapping forest disturbance with satellite imagery can be complicated if the majority of the harvesting is selective logging and not clearcuts. Our goal was to map both selective logging and clearcuts within and outside of protected areas in Western Siberia, a region with a highly developed timber industry. Combining summer and winter imagery allowed us to accurately estimate not only clearcuts, but also selective logging. Winter Landsat images substantially improved our classification and resulted in a highly accurate forest disturbance map (97.5% overall accuracy and 86% user accuracy for the rarest class, clearcuts). Selective logging and stripcuts were the dominant disturbance types, accounting for 96.3% of all forest disturbances, versus 3.7% for clearcuts. The total annual forest disturbance rate (i.e. disturbance rate for clearcuts, stripcuts and selective logging together) was 0.53%, but total forest disturbance within protected areas was greater than in non-protected forest (0.66% versus 0.50%, respectively), and so was the annual rate of selective logging (i.e. without clearcuts, 0.37% versus 0.25%, respectively). Our results highlight that monitoring only clearcuts without assessing selective logging might result in significant underestimation of forest disturbance. Also, when timber harvesting is important for the local economy and when protected areas have valuable timber resources that have already been depleted elsewhere, then additional protection may be necessary in order to maintain natural forests within protected areas. We suggest that this is the situation in our study area in Western Siberia right now and is likely the situation in many other parts of the globe as well.

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Copyright
Copyright © Foundation for Environmental Conservation 2017 
Figure 0

Figure 1 Study area in Altai Krai, Western Siberia, with Landsat footprint path 147/row 23.

Figure 1

Table 1 List of Landsat imagery used in our analysis. All are from path 147, row 23. TM = Thematic Mapper; OLI = Operational Land Imager.

Figure 2

Figure 2 The neighbourhood of the Bobrovsky Sanctuary (from the east side). Forest inventory data with forest compartments (left) and Landsat 5 Thematic Mapper image (band combination 5, 4 and 3) of the same territory (right). Each individual colour patch indicates a forest stand (i.e. a forest patch with a similar age and tree composition). The forest is mixed with a majority of Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris), but also birch (Betula pendula) and aspen (Populus trémula) trees.

Figure 3

Table 2 Cross-validated accuracy assessment based on the training data only.

Figure 4

Table 3 Area-adjusted accuracy, based on independent ground truth data, for image set 5, which included images from 22 March 2009, 30 September 2009, 1 November 2009, 25 September 2013 and 16 February 2014; overall accuracy was 97.5%. CI = confidence interval.

Figure 5

Figure 3 An example of stripcuts where 30-m wide strips of forest alternate with intact forest in order to stimulate regeneration of the forest through seed dispersion. The forest disturbance rate inside of the Bolsherechensky Sanctuary (zoomed in and outlined in yellow) was as big as that outside of the protected area.

Figure 6

Table 4 Forest disturbance within and outside of protected areas (sanctuaries) in Altai Krai, Western Siberia, 2009–2013; map-based area.