Deforestation in the Miombo woodlands: a pixel-based semi-automated change detection method

Most methods of change detection require a considerable amount of effort and expertise. The procedures of change detection are visual-, classification-, object- or vector-based. The target of this research was to develop an automated and generally unsupervised combination of methods to quantify deforestation on a per pixel basis. The study area was the Gutu district in Zimbabwe. In the first step, Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) scenes were spectrally unmixed by the Spectral Mixture Analysis (SMA). The calculation of the necessary endmembers was performed by means of the N-FINDR algorithm. After the unmixing process, the data were analysed with change vector analysis (CVA) utilizing spherical statistics. Thereafter, a combination of constraints, including a Bayesian threshold and spherical angles, was applied to identify deforestation. The combination of these methods provided an accurate idea of the state of deforestation and enabled attribution to ‘fire-induced’ and ‘non fire-induced’ classes.

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