Monitoring tropical peatland ecosystem in regional scale using multi-temporal MODIS data: Present possibilities and future challenges

Many studies on peatland ecosystem have been focused on forest conversion or forest degradation as a single pathway, meanwhile; in the context of peatland ecosystem, the change in land surface is more complicated since it can be categorized into two types and mechanisms: 1) gradual change, caused by interannual climate variability and forestland degradation, and 2) abrupt change, caused by disturbances such as deforestation and wildfires. Understanding this change types is needed for conservation and management, particularly to improve understanding of terrestrial environmental change in peatland ecosystem. In such situation, simultaneous analysis of land surface attributes from long-term datasets and seasonal variation seems to be a way to monitor the tropical peatland ecosystem. This analysis provides information about how the changes occurred accurately as well as how big are these affected areas. In this article, the feasibility of using long-term MODIS data for monitoring the dynamics change in peatland ecosystem is examined. The temporal vegetation dynamics of long-term MODIS datasets offer great promise for characterizing gradual change as well as abrupt change at large scale, however, the mixed pixel issue and some residual noises in temporal sequences are quite problematic when using MODIS data.