The Forest Types and Ages Cleared for Land Development in Puerto Rico

Kennaway, Todd A.; Helmer, Eileen H.

doi:10.2747/1548-1603.44.4.356

Cited by 90 publications

(115 citation statements)

References 32 publications

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“…As in previous research, we found increases in both urban and forest cover (Kennaway and Helmer 2007;ParesRamos et al 2008). Additionally, we found that while increases in forest area are leveling off, urban area is spreading much faster with fragments converging and creating larger patches.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 75%

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Forest recovery in a tropical landscape: what is the relative importance of biophysical, socioeconomic, and landscape variables?

et al. 2009

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Socioeconomic changes in many areas in the tropics have led to increasing urbanization, abandonment of agriculture, and forest re-growth. Although these patterns are well documented, few studies have examined the drivers leading to landscape-level forest recovery and the resulting spatial structure of secondary forests. Land cover transitions from agricultural lands to secondary forest in the island of Puerto Rico have been ongoing since the 1940s. This study is a glimpse into this landscape level trend from 1991 to 2000. First, we relied on Landsat images to characterize changes in the landscape structure for forest, urban, and agricultural land classes. We found that although forest cover has increased in this period, forest has become increasingly fragmented while the area of urban cover has spread faster and become more clustered. Second, we used logistic regression to assess the relationship between the transition to forest and 21 biophysical, socioeconomic, and landscape variables. We found that the percentage of forest cover within a 100 m radius of a point, distance to primary roads and nature reserves, slope, and aspect are the most important predictors of forest recovery. The resulting model predicts the spatial pattern of forest recovery with

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 75%

“…Two Landsat TM and ETM + mosaics of images taken circa 1991-1992 and 2000 with 30 x 30 m resolution were used to examine patterns and drivers of recent land cover changes (Kennaway and Helmer 2007). The images were originally classified into eleven land cover classes, which we reduced to nine for our analyses (see below).…”

Section: Land Cover Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

Forest recovery in a tropical landscape: what is the relative importance of biophysical, socioeconomic, and landscape variables?

et al. 2009

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“…We reported that the forested area in 2000 is 3993.6 km 2 , which is very close to the 4068 km 2 reported in a local scale study in 2000 by the USDA Forest Service using the same types of images [29], but lower than the 4541 km 2 reported by the world bank [51]. The national scale study of land cover dataset in 2001 reported the tree cover at pixel level [52].…”

Section: Land Cover Land Use Mapping In the Tropicsmentioning

confidence: 51%

“…To collect the ground reference data for the year of 2000, we first chose the land cover polygons greater than 2.25 hectares (5 × 5 pixels) based on the historical land cover map in 2000 (see Section 2.4) [29,40] and created a 30-m negative buffer to exclude the edges. We then randomly selected 2,000 points from the centers of these polygons and manually checked the land cover of each point based on the highresolution imagery from Google Earth.…”

Section: Reference Data Collectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For comparison, a forest change map for the period of 1991-2000 was also created according to the historical land cover map of 1991 and 2000 derived from the Landsat TM and ETM+ using decision-tree classifier [29,40]. To quantify the rates of forest change along the gradients of forest coverage, we divided the main island of Puerto Rico into non-overlapping grid cells according to three window sizes, i.e., 25 × 25, 50 × 50, and 100 × 100 pixels, and cross-tabulated the forest/non-forest maps of the years of 2000 and 2010 at each scale.…”

Section: Land Cover Mapping Post Classification and Land Change Anamentioning

confidence: 99%

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Continued Reforestation and Urban Expansion in the New Century of a Tropical Island in the Caribbean

Wang

Gao

2017

Remote Sensing

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Accurate and timely monitoring of tropical land cover/use (LCLU) changes is urgent due to the rapid deforestation/reforestation and its impact on global land-atmosphere interaction. However, persistent cloud cover in the tropics imposes the greatest challenge and retards LCLU mapping in mountainous areas such as the tropic island of Puerto Rico, where forest transition changed from deforestation to reforestation due to the economy shift from agriculture to industry and service after the 1940s. To improve the LCLU mapping in the tropics and to evaluate the trend of forest transition of Puerto Rico in the new century, we integrated the optical Landsat images with the L-band SAR to map LC in 2010 by taking advantage of the cloud-penetrating ability of the SAR signals. The results showed that the incorporation of SAR data with the Landsat data significantly, although not substantially, enhanced the accuracy of LCLU mapping of Puerto Rico, and the Kappa statistic reached 90.5% from 88.4% without SAR data. The enhancement of mapping by SAR is important for urban and forest, as well as locations with limited optical data caused by cloud cover. We found both forests and urban lands continued expanding in the new century despite the declining population. However, the forest cover change slowed down in 2000-2010 compared to that in 1991-2000. The deforestation rate reduced by 42.1% in 2000-2010, and the reforestation was mostly located in the east and southeast of the island where Hurricane Georges landed and caused severe vegetation damage in 1998. We also found that reforestation increased, but deforestation decreased along the topography slope. Reforestation was much higher within the protected area compared to that in the surroundings in the wet and moist forest zones.

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Case Study: Geographic Distribution and Level of Novelty of Puerto Rican Forests

et al. 2013

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The Forest Types and Ages Cleared for Land Development in Puerto Rico

Cited by 90 publications

References 32 publications

Forest recovery in a tropical landscape: what is the relative importance of biophysical, socioeconomic, and landscape variables?

Forest recovery in a tropical landscape: what is the relative importance of biophysical, socioeconomic, and landscape variables?

Continued Reforestation and Urban Expansion in the New Century of a Tropical Island in the Caribbean

Case Study: Geographic Distribution and Level of Novelty of Puerto Rican Forests

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