From native forests to planted tree crops: disentangling tree cover transitions driven by deforestation, fire, and plantation development using satellite observations

Land-use change in tropical regions has profoundly altered forest structure, disturbance regimes, and recovery pathways over recent decades, with important implications for fire activity and land–atmosphere interactions. Medium-resolution global land cover products are widely used to analyze these dynamics in climate and Earth system studies, yet their capacity to distinguish native forests from planted tree crops across disturbance and recovery phases remains limited. This raises critical questions about how forest loss, recovery, and resilience are inferred from satellite-based observations in human-modified tropical landscapes.

Here, we examine how forest-to-tree-crop transitions are represented in the ESA CCI Land Cover medium-resolution land cover (MRLC) product at 300 m spatial resolution over the period 1992–2022, and how these transitions relate to fire occurrence across Southeast Asia. We combine MRLC land cover maps and land cover transition layers with a high-resolution global dataset of planted tree crops providing spatial extent and year of establishment (Descals et al., 2024), together with fire information from FireCCI v5.1 at 250 m resolution (2001–2022) and fire polygon data from FRY v2.0. This integrated framework allows us to place land-cover changes associated with plantation establishment and maturation in the context of disturbance–recovery processes.

Our analysis focuses on land cover trajectories from native evergreen broadleaf forest to mosaic classes during plantation establishment, followed by reclassification to broadleaf tree cover as plantations mature. We examine the timing and duration of these transitions and their association with fire occurrence during land-use change. Preliminary results show systematic patterns in which oil palm expansion is linked to transient forest loss and elevated fire activity during early plantation stages, followed by reduced fire occurrence as plantations develop before being mapped again as tree cover.

These results demonstrate that confusion between native forests and planted tree crops in medium-resolution land cover products can lead to misleading interpretations of post-disturbance recovery and forest resilience. In particular, apparent forest recovery detected by satellite products may in some cases reflect a land-use replacement rather than true ecosystem recovery with important implications for the interpretation of disturbance–recovery dynamics, as well as for climate modeling and projections in human-modified tropical landscapes. This highlights the need for complementary high-resolution land cover information, such as that developed within the ESA CCI High Resolution Land Cover (HRLC) project, to better disentangle recovery from land-use change.