A novel framework for vegetation change characterization from time series Landsat images

Understanding terrestrial ecosystem dynamics requires a comprehensive examination of vegetation changes. Remote sensing technology has been established as an effective approach to reconstructing vegetation change history, investigating change properties, and evaluating the ecological effects. However, current remote sensing techniques are primarily focused on break detection but ignore long-term trend analysis. In this study, we proposed a novel framework based on a change detection algorithm and a trend analysis method that could integrate both short-term disturbance detection and long-term trends to comprehensively assess vegetation change. With this framework, we characterized the vegetation changes in Zhejiang Province from 1990 to 2020 using Landsat and landcover data. Benefiting from combining break detection and long-term trend analysis, the framework showcased its capability of capturing a variety of dynamics and trends of vegetation. The results show that the vegetation was browning in the plains while greening in the mountains, and the overall vegetation was gradually greening during the study period. By comparison, detected vegetation disturbances covered 57.71% of the province’s land areas (accounting for 66.92% of the vegetated region) which were mainly distributed around the built-up areas, and most disturbances (94%) occurred in forest and cropland. There were two peak timings in the frequency of vegetation disturbances: around 2003 and around 2014, and the proportions of more than twice disturbances in a single location were low. The results illustrate that this framework is promising for the characterization of regional vegetation growth, including long-term trends and short-term features. The proposed framework enlightens a new direction for the continuous monitoring of vegetation dynamics.