Investigation on changes in complex vegetation coverage using multi-temporal landsat data of Western Black Sea region--a case study.

Previous studies have been able to successfully detect changes in gently-sloping forested areas with low-diversity and homogeneous vegetation cover using medium-resolution satellite data such as landsat. The aim of the present study is to examine the capacity of multi-temporal landsat data to identify changes in forested areas with mixed vegetation and generally located on steep slopes or non-uniform topography landsat thematic mapper (TM) and landsat enhanced thematic mapperplus (ETM+) data for the years 1987-2000 was used to detect changes within a 19,500 ha forested area in the Western Black sea region of Turkey. The data comply with the forest cover type maps previously created for forest management plans of the research area. The methods used to detect changes were: post-classification comparison, image differencing, image rationing and NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index) differencing methods. Following the supervised classification process, error matrices were used to evaluate the accuracy of classified images obtained. The overall accuracy has been calculated as 87.59% for 1987 image and as 91.81% for 2000 image. General kappa statistics have been calculated as 0.8543 and 0.9038 for 1987 and 2000, respectively. The changes identified via the post-classification comparison method were compared with other change detetion methods. Maximum coherence was found to be 74.95% at 4/3 band rate. The NDVI difference and 3rd band difference methods achieved the same coherence with slight variations. The results suggest that landsat satellite data accurately conveys the temporal changes which occur on steeply-sloping forested areas with a mixed structure, providing a limited amount of detail but with a high level of accuracy. Moreover it has been decided that the post-classification comparison method can meet the needs of forestry activities better than other methods as it provides information about the direction of these changes.