Investigation of Deforestation Dynamics and Land Use Changes by ERS-1 SAR Data in Rondonia, Brazil

This work has been performed as part of a PH.D. thesis at DLR in Oberpfaffenhofen and at the University of Mainz. Data of the ERS-1 satellite's Active Microwave Instrument (AMI)have been evaluated for their potential usefulness in monitoring deforestation and land use dynamics. The evaluation of SAR data has been performed in the state of Rondonia which is one of the deforestation hot spots in tropical rainforest of the Brazilian Amazon. A total of 5 ERS-1 scenes have been used to perforrn the imaging work, data collected during a field campaign in 1995 served as reference data. The ERS-1 data have been acquired between June 1992 and October 1994. Image enhancement, filtering and automatic classification tools have been used to improve discrimination of land use classes and to analyse the images. As reference data several MLC-products of the SIRC/X-SAR mission of April and October 1994 as well as Landsat TM data of July 1994 have been used.