A project led by conservationists from the University of California, Berkeley and the World Wildlife Fund provides the first high-resolution analysis of recent deforestation and selective logging in Masoala National Park, Madagascar between 2005 and 2011 using CLASlite version 2.1. The study covers a region of remote and mountainous terrain. They found that the rate of forest change in 2010-2011 (1.27%) was much higher than in 2005-2008 (0.99%), and that the current rate is higher than the most recently published deforestation rate for all of Madagascar. An increase in forest losses over the study period corroborates recent sparse, ground-based accounts of increased illegal logging of precious hardwoods in the region's national parks. The authors also found that more than 8o% of the forest disturbance mapped with CLASlite was located within the average reported travel distance from villages surrounding the park. Story and imagery provided by Tom Allnutt, University of Californa-Berkeley and Wildlife Conservation Society.
For more information, see Allnutt, T.F., et al. (2013) on the CLASlite Community Publications page.
Raw SPOT imagery from (a) 2005 and (b) 2011 collected over the Masoala National Park in Madagascar, automatically converted to (c) forest change (disturbance + deforestation) using CLASlite.
