Monitoring deforestation in Kenya

Multi-temporal data is used to determine the rate of deforestation between the years 1976, 1987 and 2000. Three Landsat images, for each period, are pre-processed, mosaicked and normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) values computed. Based on the values, totally non-forested areas are masked...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:International journal of environmental studies 2004-06, Vol.61 (3), p.281-291
Main Authors: NGIGI, THOMAS G., TATEISHI, RYUTARO
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Animal, plant and microbial ecology
Applied ecology
Biological and medical sciences
Conservation, protection and management of environment and wildlife
Deforestation
Effects
Environmental degradation: ecosystems survey and restoration
Forests
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
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Summary:Multi-temporal data is used to determine the rate of deforestation between the years 1976, 1987 and 2000. Three Landsat images, for each period, are pre-processed, mosaicked and normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) values computed. Based on the values, totally non-forested areas are masked out. The forested areas, both partially and wholly, show a very high degree of correlation between all the bands (reflective), thus necessitating an application of principal components transformation. The first two principal components and NDVI values are used in K-means unsupervised classification to distinguish forest from non-forest areas (that appeared as forest at first). Comparison of the resulting thematic maps gives an annual deforestation rate of roughly 15,000 ha. or 2% between any two epochs.
ISSN:0020-7233
1029-0400
DOI:10.1080/0020723032000170959