Monitoring forest clear cut is considered crucial to quantify and to mesure sustainible forest management Indicator. The new research paper focus on the use of Landsat Time series data to quantify forest recovery rate of coppice clearcuts.
We used a refernce ground dataset of clearcut among a period fifteen yars (1999-2015) and we found that:
- Coppice clearcuts can be study from satellite images analyzing the spectral trajectories derived by multitemporal satellite data;
- The Vegetation Index spectral trajectories analysis can be use to detect the year of clearcut and the revovery rate of forests;
- Clearcut areas in coppice forests have a very rapid post- harvest recovery (i.e. 2-4 years) comparing to the ones reported by other authors for boreal and continental forests (i.e. >10 years)
- Thanks to the Canopy Height Model derived by Airborne Laser Scanner data we measured height increment of coppice forest that is approximattelly 1 meter per year in the first 10 years after the cut.
The full paper is available in Annals of Forest Science at this link https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13595-020-00936-2
Paper Reference:
Chirici, G., Giannetti, F., Mazza, E., Francini, S., Travaglini, D., Pegna, R., White, J.C. (2020) Monitoring clearcutting and subsequent rapid recovery in Mediterranean coppice forests with Landsat time series. Ann. For. Sci. 77. doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13595-020-00936-2