Deforestation Detection and Monitoring in Cedar Forests of the Moroccan Middle-Atlas Mountains

The main objective of this study was to identify areas of deforestation/reforestation in the Middle-Atlas cedar forest and monitor their temporal dynamics. The aim was to detect a detailed “from-to” change information; it targets a quantitative estimation of the extent and the magnitude of the changes affecting major identified species of the Moroccan cedar ecosystem: cedar, oak, and deciduous. The major challenge was to identify changes of interest such as identifying the change due to a selective logging which consists on cutting cedar canopy trees while sparing the understory oak trees. To address these issues and achieve our objectives, we adopted a methodology with two main stages. First, we mapped major forest species from multidate satellite images (Thematic Mapper (TM), Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+), and Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER)) using maximum likelihood classification (MLC) and spectral mixture analysis (SMA). Second, we performed change detection assessment using two procedures: (i) image products differencing to assess the overall change in the forest cover, (ii) post-classification comparisons using the outputs of the MLC and the relative abundances of forest species as determined by SMA. Results have shown the following: logging has decreased cedar area in a proportion of 12% while reforestation has yielded an increase of 8% in cedar forest; in oak forest, the increment (21%) has exceeded the deforestation effect (17%); conversely, deciduous have either degraded (11%) or remained stable (21%).