Amazon Rainforest Deforestation Essay

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Chapter 1
Introduction
1. Introduction
Deforestation is defined as the conversion of forest cover to non-forest land by human activities and is one of the biggest environmental challenges today. Forests all around the world are threatened by unsustainable deforestation but especially severe has the clearing of the tropical rainforests been [6]. Satellite imagery provides an efficient means to retrieve information on the status and extent of forest resource and changes thereof. The large are coverage and high spatial resolution of newly launched optical and radar satellite systems offer new opportunities to remotely estimate and access land cover information on a wall-to-wall basis. At the same time the high temporal resolution and capacity …show more content…

Most of its area (about 60%) is located in Brazil, with the remainder spread across eight other South American countries (collectively, the Amazon region). The average annual area deforested in the Amazon region during 2005–10 was nearly five times as large as the annual area deforested in Indonesia, which had the highest deforestation rate of any tropical country outside of the Amazon. Deforestation remains a serious concern in the Amazon region, despite an 80% reduction in the annual area deforested in the Brazilian portion between 1995 and 2005 and 2014 …show more content…

Although remote sensing techniques such as simple visual interpretation of the satellite imagery, texture and technical spectral mixture modeling have been successfully implemented for the detection and quantification of clear-cut logging, the detection of subtle logging has remained a challenge particularly using coarse and moderate spatial resolution satellite data Traditionally, remote sensing methods have successfully been applied to detect clear-cut deforestation resulting from land clearance for agriculture or cattle ranching. However, subtle deforestation resulting from such activities as selective logging which targets individual tree species is an important component of deforestation and has largely remained unquantified particularly using remotely sensed methods

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