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Carpathian Journal of Earth and Environmental Sciences

An International Peer-Reviewed Open Access Journal

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ARTICLE IN » Volume 14, 2019 - Number 1

SURVEY OF FOREST COVER CHANGES BY MEANS OF MULTIFRACTAL ANALYSIS



Emilian DANILA1, Hahuie VALENTIN1,2, Puiu Lucian GEORGESCU1 & Luminița MORARU1*
1”Dunărea de Jos” University of Galati, Faculty of Sciences and Environment, Department of Chemistry, Physics and Environment, 47 Domnească Street, RO-800008, Galati, Romania, * Corresponding author: Luminita.moraru@ugal.ro
2The Forestry Department, 95 Stiintei Street, RO-800170 Galati, Romania


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Abstract

DOI: 10.26471/cjees/2019/014/057

Land cover and land cover changes affect the environment in such ways that they can influence the human health by changing the climate, weather, water, air, biodiversity, wildlife, disease risk and food security. Comparing aerial or satellite images from the same region recorded at different times, known as post-classification comparison, is an approach that aims to identify changes in land coverage and understand forest spatial pattern change over time. These patterns are extremely complex, therefore, for their description and understanding a better approach would be multifractal geometry. In this paper, by using the multifractal analysis the evolution of the forest spatial model in southern Moldova over a decade has been investigated. We explored the potential of aerial image processing, lacunarity and textural analysis to detect a correlation between lacunarity, fractal dimensions and coverage crowns areas. This analysis leads to the determination of the percentage of land coverage, the dynamics of the natural reforestation process, the location of mature trees and the determination of areas where the landscape has changed drastically due to deforestation and / or reforestation. Two opposite forest spatial patterns were identified. For four studied forests, the rate of deforestation was continuously increased between 2005 and 2010. For only one forest, the Valeni forest, the coverage crown area has increased over the analyzed time period.

Keywords:
  • Forest
  • landscape
  • change
  • Fractal
  • analysis
  • Multifractal
  • Multifractal
  • spectra
  • Deforestation.

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© 2019 by the author(s). Licensee CJEES, Carpathian Association of Environment and Earth Sciences. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

How to cite

Emilian DANILA, Hahuie VALENTIN, Puiu Lucian GEORGESCU & Luminița MORARU (2019). SURVEY OF FOREST COVER CHANGES BY MEANS OF MULTIFRACTAL ANALYSIS, Carpathian Journal of Earth and Environmental Sciences, February 2019, Vol. 14, No. 1, p. 51 - 60; https://doi.org/10.26471/cjees/2019/014/057

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