Satellite Forest Monitoring in Canada | About
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The Canadian Forest Service of Natural Resources Canada, partnered with the University of British Columbia, with support from the Canadian Space Agency, has been developing the science and methods to track and characterize the history of Canada’s forests. For this research we use Landsat imagery to detect changes, identify the year in which the changes occur, and estimate a change type (such as harvest or wildfire). A change detection approach was applied to an annual time series of Landsat data, enabling the detection of abrupt (e.g. fire) and gradual (e.g. drought) changes. From the time series we can also assess the recovery of forests after disturbances by wildfire and harvest. In this research, we have developed an explore and discovery tool to portray and communicate forest change over Canada. The map shows points representing locations where forest change has been observed between 1985 and 2011. The source Landsat imagery is a continuous surface of pixels, each representing a 30m x 30m square area. For visualization purposes the pixels have been converted to points, and generalized at different zoom levels.