Evaluating capabilities of using thermal imagery for detecting impacts of forest operations on residual forests

Abstract

Remote sensing technologies potentially provide important advantages in forest operations by reducing the workload of forestry, evaluating the large areas with less time, and making straight forward plans. Recently, satellites and other aerial vehicles combined with different sensors provide important remotely sensed data that have intensive usage in the forestry such as land use/land change detection, forest transportation, the forest fire management. Landsat, MODIS, SPOT, IKONOS are common observation satellites used for environmental assessments in which thermal sensors are one of the most preferred tools used for monitoring forest resources. Especially freely available Landsat thermal imagery offering bulk gallery for land time series (LTS) provide researchers and practitioners with great data sources for conducting studies on digital image processing. As a result of this study, it is concluded that thermal imagery can be effectively used for detecting impacts of forest operations on residual forests.