The overall objective of this research is to investigate the spatial patterns of stand level forest disturbance and expansion in the vicinity of a provincial protected area over time. This research uses a medium resolution image time-series; spanning a twenty-five year period from 1984 to 2009. The detection of forest disturbance events on the land surface was examined on an interval ranging from two to five years. Image band differencing and raster arithmetic were utilized to create disturbance maps that illustrate the size, spatial distribution and rate of stand level forest disturbances within the study site. This analysis also made use of the Tasselled Cap Transformation (TCT) [18] and the Normalized Difference Moisture Index (NDMI) [18,36] to extract additional spectral information from the original Landsat image bands. Finally, unsupervised classification was used to determine the land cover for each image scene.
ISPRS