Support of Multispectral Very High Resolution Remotely Sensed Imagery for Old-Growth Beech Forest Detection

Abstract

In the Mediterranean basin human activity has modified landscapes for millennia, nevertheless there are few remote forest areas relatively untouched long enough from direct anthropogenic disturbance to develop old-growth attributes. The aim of this note is to assess the potential of QuickBird (QB) satellite multispectral imagery for detecting old-growth forest stands, considering as case study a Mediterranean beech forest in central Italy. The segmentation-based analysis of QB image proved to be a promising tool to detect scaledependent pattern of forest structural heterogeneity. Values of remotely sensed attributes are compared in old-growth and not-old-growth stands: the statistical analysis showed that oldgrowthness is associated to the variability of multispectral reflectance from the image objects (polygons). Green band variability, notably, expressed by Ratio_band_2 has proven to be helpful for predicting old-growthness.

Characterization, structure and genetic dating of an old-growth beech-fir forest in the northern Apennines (Italy)

“…The interest on old-growth forest studies has been recently renewed by national projects aimed to increase the knowledge on old-growth forest stands in the Alps and Apennines (Blasi 2010;Chirici & Nocentini 2010;Piovesan et al 2010). In these projects, the following topics were addressed: ecology ) and stand structure (Ciancio et al 2010;Iovino et al 2010;Manes et al 2010;Palombo et al 2010;Piovesan et al 2010), deadwood (Burrascano et al 2008;Lombardi et al 2010;Motta et al 2010), vascular flora (Sabatini et al 2010), lichens and bryophytes (Brunialti et al 2010;Potenza & Fascetti 2010;Ravera et al 2010), carbon stock (Piovesan et al 2010), genetic diversity (Vettori et al 2010), monitoring systems Corona et al 2010;Di Paolo et al 2010) and, finally, possible indications from old-growth studies in supporting forest management and planning in areas with long standing human impact (Nocentini 2010).…”