Papers by Keyword: Deforestation

Abstract: Deforestation is a significant threat to the sustainability of the ecosystem, leading to adverse effects such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and socio-economic consequences. Timely monitoring of forest destruction enables effective implementation of preventive mechanisms supported by law enforcement. Advancements in remote sensing, coupled with enhanced deep learning techniques, boost efficient deforestation monitoring as these technologies support real-time analysis of complex satellite images. Thus, this study aimed to develop a classification model to identify forest areas from non-forest areas using Landsat-8 data acquired for Wilpattu park, Sri Lanka, between 2015 to 2024. We explored model building using minimal input of two bands in satellite data, facilitating low resource needs. Seven deep learning models were explored, progressing from Convolution Neural Networks to Transformer-based models to build the classifier using a set of patches of size 100×100. The results were evaluated using standard metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall, F1 score, and Kappa index. We found that SegNet outperformed the remaining models with an overall accuracy of 96.36%, F1 score of 0.97, and Kappa index of 0.92, demonstrating excellent ability to distinguish the classes. However, the efficiency of the model needs further improvement. The proposed system will contribute to deforestation detection, offering a simpler model development approach with minimum input requirements. The proposed method can be adopted to other domains where the chosen band combination supports effective detection, such as water body identification.

Abstract: Three commonly used expressions for modeling soil-water infiltration were evaluated for a tropical rainforest watershed in southwestern Nigeria under conditions of old, highly weathered soils and high rainfall intensities. The evaluation focused on the suitability of the expressions in assessing the decrease in infiltration opportunities that usually accompany deforestation. The equations were fitted into data spanning nine years obtained from infiltrometer experiments of the type where infiltration and runoff are generated onsite in response to single rainfall intensity without allowing for any modification due to inflow. The analysis revealed that soil-water infiltration into these tropical alfisols is better described by the Kostiakov’s model. Effects of duration of cultivation for different years following deforestation of the secondary vegetation were highlighted.