Spatial and temporal deep learning methods for deriving land-use following deforestation: A pan-tropical case study using Landsat time series

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Assessing land-use following deforestation is vital for reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation. In this paper, for the first time, we assess the potential of spatial, temporal and spatio-temporal deep learning methods for large-scale classification of land-use following tropical deforestation using dense satellite time series over six years on the pan-tropical scale (incl. Latin America, Africa, and Asia). Based on an extensive reference database of six forest to land-use conversion types, we find that the spatio-temporal models achieved a substantially higher F1-score accuracies than models that account only for spatial or temporal patterns. Although all models performed better when the scope of the problem was limited to a single continent, the spatial models were more competitive than the temporal ones in this setting. These results suggest that the spatial patterns of land-use within a continent share more commonalities than the temporal patterns and the spatial patterns across continents. This work explores the feasibility of extending and complementing previous efforts for characterizing follow-up land-use after deforestation at a small-scale via human visual interpretation of high resolution RGB imagery. It supports the usage of fast and automated large-scale land-use classification and showcases the value of deep learning methods combined with spatio-temporal satellite data to effectively address the complex tasks of identifying land-use following deforestation in a scalable and cost effective manner.
Authors: Masolele, R.N.; De Sy, V.; Herold, M.; Gonzalez, D.M.; Verbesselt, J.; Gieseke, F.; Mullissa, A.G.; Martius, C.
Subjects: deforestation, land use, spatial data, satellite imagery, time series, models
Publication type: ISI, Journal Article, Publication
Year: 2021
ISSN: 0034-4257

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