Detecting long-term changes to vegetation in northern Canada using the Landsat satellite image archive

By R. Fraser, I. Olthof, M. Carrière, A. Deschamps, D. Pouliot. 2011

144 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Analysis of coarse resolution (∼1 km) satellite imagery has provided evidence of vegetation changes in arctic regions since the mid-1980s that may be attributable to climate warming. Here we investigate finer-scale changes to northern vegetation over the same period using stacks of 30 m resolution Landsat TM and ETM + satellite images. Linear trends in the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and tasseled cap indices are derived for four widely spaced national parks in northern Canada. The trends are related to predicted changes in fractional shrub and other vegetation covers using regression tree classifiers trained with plot measurements and high resolution imagery. We find a consistent pattern of greening (6.1–25.5% of areas increasing) and predicted increases in vascular vegetation in all four parks that is associated with positive temperature trends. Coarse resolution (3 km) NDVI trends were not detected in two of the parks that had less intense greening. A range of independent studies and observations corroborate many of the major changes observed.

Subfields: Atmospheric Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/193e22583e9869f5cd253979aca2f30d2bf86855

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In Atmospheric Science

1. Mark A. Friedl
2. D. Sulla‐Menashe
3. Conor D. Mallory
4. Curtis E. Woodcock
5. M. Boyce
6. S. Boudreau
7. Zhe Zhu

Citations in the corpus

• Trend Change Detection in NDVI Time Series: Effects of Inter-Annual Variability and Methodology (2013, unknown): “Trends from the GIMMS dataset compare well with trends computed from Landsat imagery [22].”
• Observed and predicted effects of climate change on Arctic caribou and reindeer (2018, background): “Along with predicted 190 effects of climate change, many studies have documented current increasing trends in 191 primary productivity in the Arctic (e.g., Fraser et al. 2011; Elmendorf et al. 2012; Ju and 192 Masek 2016) occurring in parallel to changing plant community composition.”
• Canadian boreal forest greening and browning trends: an analysis of biogeographic patterns and the relative roles of disturbance versus climate drivers (2017, result): “Similar to previous studies (Neigh et al2008, Fraser et al 2011, McManus et al 2012), they identified widespread greening above the boreal treeline, but showed substantial differences in boreal forest NDVI trends relative to results based on AVHRR data.”
• Vegetation monitoring using multispectral sensors – best practices and lessons learned from high latitudes (2018, background): “Particularly in remote high-latitude ecosystems, where satellite records suggest a “greening” of tundra ecosystems from normalised difference vegetation index (NDVI) time series (Fraser et al. 2011; Guay et al. 2014; Ju and Masek 2016), multispectral drone monitoring could play an important role in ”
• Recent expansion of erect shrubs in the Low Arctic: evidence from Eastern Nunavik (2012, methodology): “These findings are consistent with regional-scale NDVI analysis (Fraser et al 2011, McManus et al 2012) and other studies using repeated pairs of aerial vertical or oblique photographs in different regions of subarctic North America (Sturm et al 2001a, Tape et al 2006, Ropars and Boudreau 2012).”