TITLE:
Determination and Analysis of Hot Spot Areas of Deforestation Using Remote Sensing and Geographic Information System Techniques. Case Study: State Sinaloa, México
AUTHORS:
Sergio Alberto Monjardin Armenta, Carlos Eduardo Pacheco Angulo, Wenseslao Plata Rocha, Gabriela Corrales Barraza, Rosendo Romero Andrade, Jose Carlos Beltran Gonzalez
KEYWORDS:
Deforestation, Hot Spot, GIS, Landsat, Terra Amazon
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Forestry,
Vol.6 No.4,
July
20,
2016
ABSTRACT: The main
objective of this research is to analyze deforestation in State Sinaloa during
the period 1990-2014. For this, “deforestationhot-spot areas” were identified, by crossing maps
of 1993 and 2011 at a 1:250,000 scale with knowledge from environmental and
forest experts from each region. Landsat images from 1990 and 2014 and Terra Amazon
System were used to monitor the most critical hot spot area, applying Linear
Spectral Mixture Analysis and Image Segmentation Ground Product. In order to
generate the map deforestation year zero (1990), every segmented object of
ground product was visually assigned to “Forest” and “No-Forest” categories.
Therefore, gains and losses were interpreted for the map deforestation year one
(2014). Those products were validated with the help of experts on the subject
and applying a confusion matrix. Results obtained indicated that the highest
forest loss was located in North-Central Sinaloa (hot spot area number two) by
establishing the average annual rate of deforestation of 4741.90 ha/year with
an average rate of 0.60%, being higher than the national average rate (0.37%). This result
affects directlyon calculation of carbonfluxes at nationallevel.