New approaches and remote sensing technologies for forest disturbance mapping and area estimation

Abstract

In this thesis, we demonstrated different methodologies to map forest disturbance and to estimate relative areas using remote sensing data. Herein, we show (i) innovative algorithms producing forest disturbance maps with large accuracy and (ii) statistically rigorous approaches to produce precise estimates and requiring little effort to conventional procedures. Further, we used data from different satellite missions to increase the promptness with which forest changes can be detected. This thesis contributes to demonstrating that remote sensing data should be used to monitor forest changes at different spatio-temporal scales, but this is not the case in several countries.