Monitoring forest degradation in tropical forests has continued to be a challenge.Can NDVI be used as a proxy to degradation?.Any suggestion
dear George, In my opinion, assessing and monitoring forest degradation using NDVI is of course, generally speaking, possible and it represent a very effective indicator (among many others). However, a dedicated methodology has to be applied in different study regions, on a case by case basis, taking into account a number of factors and, of course, availability of imagery, aims of the assessment/monitoring etc. etc. There are many nice documents from FAO, also available on the WWW, so that I would suggest to have a look at them. There are also very important documents from EU JRC. Hope it helps, regards, Giuseppe
As per Giuseppe's comment, there are many other specific tropical forest indicators that you can use. If you want to use NDVI, I would try and get the max value for a composite of images (could be any unit of time, like month or year) and see how that changes over time. The main problem with this method is that it would be difficult to translate the change in NDVI to a specific amount of degredation, which is why radar data can be useful (to quantify changes in biomass)
It is noted that the previous answers lack a specific published case in a peer reviewed journal.
From first principle, NDVI would seem an unlikely proxy variable for assessment of degradation of a multi-layered, evergreen forest because of the saturation of NDVI under such conditions. It may serve the purpose for a sudden forest conversion to treeless farmland, opencast mines and urban areas. within the forest For grassland, NDVI is suitable.
For an alternative RS assessment of tropical and temperate zone forest degradation avoiding the inherent limitations of NDVI, please be referred to our papers from Bolivia (2006) and Majella (2008) respectively.
have fun
Thanks for the information Hein Van Gils ,i will definitely look at your work. But I was trying to widen the scope beyond the RS assessment techniques,as suggest by James Marcaccio , what other indicators and approaches can be used to pinpoint degradation.
Thanks Giuseppe Brundu ,I will look at both FAO and EU JRC as you have recommended.
Thanks everyone for your response
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