Following a site-specific secondary succession in the Amazon using the Landsat CDR product and field inventory data

Secondary forests cover large areas and are strong carbon sinks in tropical regions. They are important for ecosystem functioning, biodiversity conservation, watershed protection, and recovery of soil fertility. In this study, we used the Surface Reflectance Climate Data Record (CDR) product from 16 Thematic Mapper (TM)/Landsat-5 images (1984–2010) to continuously track the secondary succession (SS) of a forest following land abandonment in 1980. Changes in canopy structure and floristic composition were analysed using data from four field inventories (1995, 2002, 2007, and 2012). To characterize variations in brightness, greenness, spectral reflectance, and shadows with the natural regeneration of vegetation, we applied tasselled cap transformations, principal component analysis (PCA), and linear spectral mixture models to the TM datasets. Shade fractions were plotted over time and correlated with the enhanced vegetation index (EVI) and the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI). Because image texture may reflect the variability of the successional process, eight co-occurrence-based filter metrics were calculated for selected TM bands and plotted as a function of time since abandonment. The successional forest was compared to a nearby primary reference forest (PF) and had differences in the spectral and textural means evaluated using analysis of variance (ANOVA). The results showed increases of 35% and 10.4% over time in basal area and tree height, respectively. Species richness within the assemblage of sampling units increased from 14 to 71 between 1995 and 2012, and this trend was also confirmed using an individual-based rarefaction analysis. Species richness in 2012 was still lower than that observed in the PF site, which presented greater amounts of aboveground biomass (336.4 ± 17.0 ton ha ⁻¹ for PF versus 98.5 ± 21.4 ton ha ⁻¹ for SS in 2012). Brightness and greenness tasselled cap differences between the SS and PF rapidly decreased from 1984 (SS at the age of 4 years) to 1991 (age of 11 years). Brightness also decreased from 1997 to 2003, as indicated by PC1 scores and surface reflectance of the TM bands 4 (near infrared) and 5 (shortwave infrared). Spectral mixture shade fraction increased from young to old successional stages with strata composition and canopy structure development, whereas NDVI and EVI decreased over time. Because EVI was strongly dependent on near infrared reflectance (r = + 0.96), it was also much more strongly correlated with the shade fraction (r = −0.93) than NDVI. Except for the image texture mean that decreased from young to old successional stages in TM bands 4 and 5, no clear trend was observed in the remaining texture metrics over the time period of vegetation regeneration. Overall, due to structural-floristic and spectral/textural differences with the PF, the SS site was still distinguishable using Landsat data 30 years after land abandonment. Most of the spectral metric means between PF and SS were significantly different over time at 0.01 significance level, as indicated by ANOVA.