Recent Advances in Forest Observation with Visual Interpretation of Very High-Resolution Imagery
2019
Schepaschenko, Dmitry | See, Linda | Lesiv, Myroslava | Bastin, Jean-François | Mollicone, Danilo | Tsendbazar, Nandin-Erdene | Bastin, Lucy | McCallum, Ian | Laso Bayas, Juan Carlos | Baklanov, Artem | Perger, Christoph | Dürauer, Martina | Fritz, Steffen
The land area covered by freely available very high-resolution (VHR) imagery has grown dramatically over recent years, which has considerable relevance for forest observation and monitoring. For example, it is possible to recognize and extract a number of features related to forest type, forest management, degradation and disturbance using VHR imagery. Moreover, time series of medium-to-high-resolution imagery such as MODIS, Landsat or Sentinel has allowed for monitoring of parameters related to forest cover change. Although automatic classification is used regularly to monitor forests using medium-resolution imagery, VHR imagery and changes in web-based technology have opened up new possibilities for the role of visual interpretation in forest observation. Visual interpretation of VHR is typically employed to provide training and/or validation data for other remote sensing-based techniques or to derive statistics directly on forest cover/forest cover change over large regions. Hence, this paper reviews the state of the art in tools designed for visual interpretation of VHR, including Geo-Wiki, LACO-Wiki and Collect Earth as well as issues related to interpretation of VHR imagery and approaches to quality assurance. We have also listed a number of success stories where visual interpretation plays a crucial role, including a global forest mask harmonized with FAO FRA country statistics; estimation of dryland forest area; quantification of deforestation; national reporting to the UNFCCC; and drivers of forest change.
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