Combining post-disturbance land cover and tree canopy cover from Landsat time series data for mapping deforestation, forest degradation, and recovery across Cambodia

Mapping of deforestation, forest degradation, and recovery is essential to characterize country-level forest change and formulate mitigation actions. Previous studies have mainly used a simple forest/non-forest classification after forest disturbance to identify deforestation and forest degradation. However, a more flexible approach that is applicable to different forest conditions is desirable. In this study, we examined an approach for mapping deforestation, forest degradation, and recovery using disturbance types and tree canopy cover estimates from annual Landsat time-series data from 1988 to 2020 across Cambodia. We developed models to estimate both disturbance types and tree canopy cover based on a random forest algorithm using predictor variables derived from a trajectory-based temporal segmentation approach. The estimated disturbance types and canopy cover in each year were then used in a rule-based classification of deforestation, forest degradation, and recovery. The producer’s and user’s accuracies ranged from 59.1% to 72.9% and 60.8% to 91.6%, respectively, for the forest change classes of mapping deforestation, forest degradation, and recovery. The approach developed here can be adjusted for different definitions of deforestation, forest degradation, and recovery according to research objectives and thus has the potential to be applied to other study areas.