Long-term change of protective forest during the past four decades at Dongshan Island, southeastern China

Abstract

The Dongshan Island is a typical protective forest area of the southeastern coastal region of China. In this work, we extract the variation of the Dongshan Island’s protective forest area since the 1970s from the remote sensing data of the LandSAT and the Chinese HJ 1A/B satellites, and we examined the possible reasons for the variation. The results showed that the maximum likelihood classification of the extracted remote sensing data of the Dongshan Island coastal protective forest had a total accuracy of 92.6%. In the last 40 years, the area of the Dongshan Island coastal protective forest experienced a waving variation of decrease (1973-1984), increase (1984-1999) and decrease (1999-2008), in which human activity was the predominant impact factor for this fluctuation pattern. Since the early 1960s to the 1980s, due to the Cultural Revolution and the later deforestation and land reclamation activities, the protective forest of Dongshan Island was severely damaged. The total area declined sharply from 2134.4 ha in 1964 to 1515.74 ha in 1984, and the northern area of the island had the most significant decrease. After 1988, the Fujian Province began to aggressively establish the coastal protective forest system, and the protective forest acreage increased significantly to 3370.22 ha in 1999, an increase of nearly 1.2 times based on the figure of 1984. In the past five years, the area of protective forest declined slightly again, mainly because of the natural aging of the protective forest ecosystem, tourism development and the booming aquaculture industry.