Assessing Global Forest Land-Use Change by Object-Based Image Analysis

Consistent estimates of forest land-use and change over time are important for understanding and managing human activities on the Earth’s surface, parameterizing models used for global and regional climate change analyses and a critical component of reporting requirements faced by countries as part of the international effort to Reduce Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD). In this study, object-based image analysis methods were applied to a global sample of Landsat imagery from years 1990, 2000 and 2005 to produce a land cover classification suitable for expert human review, revision and translation into forest and non-forest land use classes. We describe and analyse here the derivation and application of an automated, multi-date image segmentation, neural network classification method and independent, automated change detection procedure to all sample sites. The automated results were compared against expert human interpretation and found to have an overall agreement of ~76% for a 5-class land cover classification and ~88% agreement for change/no-change assessment. The establishment of a 5 ha minimum mapping unit affected the ability of the segmentation methods to detect small or irregularly-shaped land cover change and, combined with aggregation rules that favour forest, added bias to the automated results. However, the OBIA methods provided an efficient means of processing over 11,000 sample sites, 33,000 Landsat 20 × 20 km sample tiles and more than 6.5 million individual polygons over three epochs and adequately facilitated human expert review, revision and conversion to a global forest land-use product.