Monthly mapping of forest harvesting using dense time series Sentinel-1 SAR imagery and deep learning

Compared with disturbance maps produced at annual or multi-year time steps, monthly mapping of forest harvesting can provide more temporal details needed for studying the socio-economic drivers (e.g., differentiating salvage logging and slash-and-burn from other timber harvesting) of harvesting and characterizing the associated intra-annual carbon and hydrological dynamics. Frequent cloud cover limits the application of optical remote sensing in timely mapping of forest changes. The freely available Sentinel-1 synthetic aperture radar (SAR) sensor provides an unprecedented opportunity to achieve more frequent mapping of forest harvesting than ever before (i.e., at monthly interval). The unique landscape pattern of forest harvesting from Sentienl-1 data (i.e., how a harvested patch contrasts to surrounding intact forests) holds critical information for harvesting mapping but have not been fully explored. In this study, we propose a deep learning-based (i.e., U-Net) approach using the landscape pattern from Sentinel-1 data to produce monthly maps of forest harvesting in two deforestation hotspots - California, USA and Rondônia, Brazil – for as long as three years. Our results show that (1) our proposed approach is reliable (mean F1 scores (the geometric mean of user's and producer's accuracies) 0.74–0.78; mean IoU (the area of intersection over union between the prediction part and target part) 0.59–0.65) for monthly forest harvesting mapping with Sentinel-1 data, outperforming the traditional object-based approach (0.38–0.43 in IoU). The varying harvesting pattern from Sentinel-1 data can be recognized by the U-Net bottleneck block as whole entities, which is the key advantage of our proposed approach; (2) multi-temporal SAR filtering is helpful for improving the accuracies of our proposed approach (increased F1 and IoU for 0.04 and 0.06, respectively); (3) our proposed model can be trained using samples collected during a particular time period over one location and be fine-tuned using sparse local samples from a new area to achieve optimal performance, and hence can greatly reduce training data collection effort when applied to new study sites; (4) forest harvesting maps produced using our approach revealed substantial variations in monthly harvesting activities: in Rondônia, most of the forest harvest occurred in July/August (the dry season) and about 14% of the dry season harvesting were followed by fires (i.e., slash-and-burn); in California, the rates of forest harvesting were relatively stable, but abnormally high values could occur due to salvage logging after big fires. Our novel approach for mapping forest harvesting at monthly interval represents an important step towards timely monitoring of forest harvesting and assisting stakeholders in developing sustainable strategy of forest management, especially for regions with frequent cloud cover.