Discriminating native and plantation forests in a Landsat time-series for land use policy design

ABSTRACTThe Warren River Catchment of south-western Australia is an area of high biodiversity threatened by the loss of native vegetation and dryland salinity. Over the last 20 years, it has been the target of a series of policies that encourage conversion of agricultural land to plantation forest. Remote sensing has a key role in measuring trends in the area of plantation forest observed across the landscape and hence the effectiveness of policy initiatives. Despite its importance to land use policy, accurate data on historical land use and land cover (LULC) dynamics of two spectrally similar but ecologically distinct forest types – such as native forest and plantation forest – are not readily available for south-western Australia, largely due to prohibitive data delivery costs. However, we argue that regular low-cost monitoring of long-term change in the spatial distribution of plantation forest through remote sensing is a critical input into environmental policy for the catchment. To this end, a 35-yea...