# Massachusetts Forest Cover

For my senior honors thesis, I worked to update a Landsat forest cover map for Massachusetts to 2015. At Clark University forest cover maps for the state have been produced back to the 1970’s in ~10 year intervals based on data availability. Landsat 8 data for summer months of 2015 were used, with 15 images (3 per Landsat scene) in total. CLASlite was used, a software produced by the Carnegie Institution for Science, which classifies raw imagery into fractional cover (soil, photosynthetic vegetation, and non-photosynthetic vegetation) and forest cover maps. CLASlite is a semi-automated approach, user input is only data and thresholds for classification and masking, and most importantly, it’s FREE!

CLASlite has a change detection step included, however we chose to use our own method of doing change detection, as we wanted to use multiple dates of Landsat 8 imagery to classify forest for greater confidence. Each Landsat scene had 3 images, which each were classified into forest cover maps from fractional cover using CLASlite. Confidence of forest was calculated using the equation, $Confidence=\frac{N_{f}-N_{n_f}}{N_{f}+N_{n_f}}$, where $N_{f}$ is the number of times a pixel was classified as forest and $N_{n_f}$ is the number of times a pixel was classified as non-forest. This confidence map was then reclassified to forest cover where values 0 to 0.6 are non-forest, and 0.6 to 1 are forest.

## Results

### Forest Cover

Training Points were generated at 968 locations, stratified by Ecoregion. A basemap from MassGIS with WorldView imagery also from 2015 was used to validate that forest cover was accurately classified. Rate of accuracy varied by Ecoregion, with overall accuracy at 87%. Forest and Non-Forest cover persistence, gain, and loss shown. This shows where forest cover has grown and where it has lost area.