Assessing Forest Cover Change and Fragmentation in Northeastern British Columbia Using Landsat Images and a Geospatial Approach

Abstract

Forest cover loss and fragmentation have increased in recent years due to the increasing anthropogenic land use. Whereas previous studies have focused mostly on forest cover change from other disturbances (e.g., insects, diseases, and forest fires), little is known regarding how land uses are increasing at the expense of forest cover. Thus, we fill this research gap by assessing forest cover change and fragmentation with an emphasis on how competing anthropogenic land uses are increasing at the expense of the coniferous forests using empirical evidence from northeastern British Columbia (BC). We classified Landsat images from 1985, 2000, and 2015 using the Random Forests (RF) classification algorithm. The study finds an annual net loss of 2.3% (gain: 6.9%, loss: 9.2%) in the coniferous forest cover, but the timber harvest land base’s (THLB) share of the coniferous forest gain and loss is higher than that of the area outside the THLB. We find that the period with a lower amount of fragmentation has a lesser amount of coniferous forest cover loss and vice versa. We show that coniferous forest cover is more likely to recover from barren land. In forest areas where anthropogenic land uses are on the rise, land managers could use knowledge from our study as ancillary information in assessing the sustainability and potential cumulative impacts of anthropogenic land uses. We conclude that the rate of forest recovery from anthropogenic-induced land categories is likely to account for the amount of forest fragmentation.