scholarly journals Time Series Analysis of Land Cover Change in Dry Mountains: Insights from the Tajik Pamirs

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (19) ◽  
pp. 3951
Author(s):  
Kim André Vanselow ◽  
Harald Zandler ◽  
Cyrus Samimi

Greening and browning trends in vegetation have been observed in many regions of the world in recent decades. However, few studies focused on dry mountains. Here, we analyze trends of land cover change in the Western Pamirs, Tajikistan. We aim to gain a deeper understanding of these changes and thus improve remote sensing studies in dry mountainous areas. The study area is characterized by a complex set of attributes, making it a prime example for this purpose. We used generalized additive mixed models for the trend estimation of a 32-year Landsat time series (1988–2020) of the modified soil adjusted vegetation index, vegetation data, and environmental and socio-demographic data. With this approach, we were able to cope with the typical challenges that occur in the remote sensing analysis of dry and mountainous areas, including background noise and irregular data. We found that greening and browning trends coexist and that they vary according to the land cover class, topography, and geographical distribution. Greening was detected predominantly in agricultural and forestry areas, indicating direct anthropogenic drivers of change. At other sites, greening corresponds well with increasing temperature. Browning was frequently linked to disastrous events, which are promoted by increasing temperatures.

Author(s):  
H. C. Liu ◽  
G. J. He ◽  
X. M. Zhang ◽  
W. Jiang ◽  
S. G. Ling

With the continuous development of satellite techniques, it is now possible to acquire a regular series of images concerning a given geographical zone with both high accuracy and low cost. Research on how best to effectively process huge volumes of observational data obtained on different dates for a specific geographical zone, and to exploit the valuable information regarding land cover contained in these images has received increasing interest from the remote sensing community. In contrast to traditional land cover change measures using pair-wise comparisons that emphasize the compositional or configurational changes between dates, this research focuses on the analysis of the temporal sequence of land cover dynamics, which refers to the succession of land cover types for a given area over more than two observational periods. Using a time series of classified Landsat images, ranging from 2006 to 2011, a sequential pattern mining method was extended to this spatiotemporal context to extract sets of connected pixels sharing similar temporal evolutions. The resultant sequential patterns could be selected (or not) based on the range of support values. These selected patterns were used to explore the spatial compositions and temporal evolutions of land cover change within the study region. Experimental results showed that continuous patterns that represent consistent land cover over time appeared as quite homogeneous zones, which agreed with our domain knowledge. Discontinuous patterns that represent land cover change trajectories were dominated by the transition from vegetation to bare land, especially during 2009–2010. This approach quantified land cover changes in terms of the percentage area affected and mapped the spatial distribution of these changes. Sequential pattern mining has been used for string mining or itemset mining in transactions analysis. The expected novel significance of this study is the generalization of the application of the sequential pattern mining method for capturing the spatial variability of landscape patterns, and their trajectories of change, to reveal information regarding process regularities with satellite imagery.


Land ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chithrangani WM Rathnayake ◽  
Simon Jones ◽  
Mariela Soto-Berelov

Land use and land cover change (LULCC) are dynamic over time and space due to human and biophysical factors. Accurate and up-to-date LULCC information is a mandatory part of environmental change analysis and natural resource management. In Sri Lanka, there is a significant temporal gap in the existing LULCC information due to the civil war that took place from 1983 to 2009. In order to fill this gap, this study presents a whole-country LULCC map for Sri Lanka over a 25-year period using Landsat time-series imagery from 1993 to 2018. The LandTrendr change detection algorithm, utilising the normalised burn ratio (NBR) and normalised difference vegetation index (NDVI), was used to develop spectral trajectories over this time period. A land cover change and disturbance map was created with random forest, using 2117 manually interpreted reference pixels, of which 75% were used for training and 25% for validation. The model achieved an overall accuracy of 94.14%. The study found that 890,003.52 hectares (ha) (13.5%) of the land has changed, while 72,266.31 ha (1%) was disturbed (but not permanently changed) over the last 25 years. LULCC was found to concentrate on two distinct periods (2000 to 2004 and 2010 to 2018) when social and economic stability allowed greater land clearing and investment opportunities. In addition, LULCC was found to impact forest reserves and protected areas. This new set of Sri Lanka-wide land cover information describing change and disturbance may provide a reference point for policy makers and other stakeholders to aid in decision making and for planning purposes.


2013 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 912-921 ◽  
Author(s):  
M.Minwer Alkharabsheh ◽  
T.K. Alexandridis ◽  
G. Bilas ◽  
N. Misopolinos ◽  
N. Silleos

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