Detection of forest disturbance in the Greater Hinggan Mountain of China based on Landsat time-series data

The detection of forest disturbance, as a key process in monitoring terrestrial ecosystems, has been regarded as an effective approach for indicating the effect of various factors on biological communities. With the advancement of remote sensing technology in large-scale ecology research, we had developed a proposal to detect the change of forest community disturbance in the Greater Hinggan Mountain area of Northeast China using time-series remote sensing data. Firstly, four scenes of Landsat images from four periods of 1990-era, 2000-era, 2005-era and 2010-era were selected and pre-processed. Then, based on the Tasseled Cap transformation, the disturbance index (DI) was calculated and finally the resulting disturbance situations from different periods were analyzed. These results provided significant information on the monitoring and management of local forest.