Thirty-meter map of young forest age in China
<p>Young forest age mapping at a fine spatial resolution is important for increasing the accuracy of estimating land–atmosphere carbon fluxes and guiding forest management practices. In recent decades, China has actively conducted afforestation and forest protection projects, thereby laying th...
| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Copernicus Publications
2023-08-01
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| Series: | Earth System Science Data |
| Online Access: | https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/15/3365/2023/essd-15-3365-2023.pdf |
| Summary: | <p>Young forest age mapping at a fine spatial resolution is important
for increasing the accuracy of estimating land–atmosphere carbon fluxes and
guiding forest management practices. In recent decades, China has actively
conducted afforestation and forest protection projects, thereby laying the
foundation for the realization of carbon neutrality. However, very few
studies have been conducted which map the ages of young forests for the
whole of China at a fine spatial resolution. In this research, a continuous
change detection and classification (CCDC)-based method suitable for
large-scale forest age mapping is proposed and used to estimate young forest ages across China in 2020 at a spatial resolution of 30 m. First, a
10 m spatial-resolution land cover dataset (WorldCover2020) from the
European Space Agency (ESA) was used to determine the forest cover areas in
2020. Then, the CCDC algorithm was used to identify stand-replacing
disturbances to determine the stand age based on 436 967 Landsat tiles
across China from 1990 to 2020. A validation sample set composed of multiple
land use and land cover (LULC) products was used to calculate the overall
accuracy (OA) of the 2020 young forest age (1–31-year) map of China, and
the OA was 90.28 %. The reliability and applicability of the proposed
CCDC-based forest age mapping method were validated by comparing the forest
age map with Hansen's forest change dataset, Max Planck Institute for
Biogeochemistry (MPI-BGC) 1 km global forest age datasets, and field
measurements. The CCDC-based method has strong application potential in
real-time mapping of the age of young forests at the global scale. The
produced forest age map provides a basic dataset for research on the forest
carbon cycle and forest ecosystem services as well as important guidance for
government departments, such as the National Forestry and Grassland
Administration and the National Development and Reform Commission in China. Data presented in this study is available at <a href="https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.21627023.v7">https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.21627023.v7</a> (Xiao, 2022).</p> |
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| ISSN: | 1866-3508 1866-3516 |