Monitoring land cover change and ecological integrity in Canada's national parks

Canada's national parks system includes 43 terrestrial parks covering 3% (276,275 km2) of the country's landmass and representing its full range of natural regions. Considering the vast and often remote areas under protection, Parks Canada Agency envisions Earth Observation technology to be the basis for a Park Ecological Integrity Observing System (Park-EIOS), and integral component of a larger national parks ecological integrity (EI) monitoring program. Park-EIOS is planned for operational use beginning in 2008 and includes coarse filter EI indicators corresponding to landscape pattern, succession and retrogression, net primary productivity, and focal species distributions within parks and their surrounding greater park ecosystems. A primary input to produce all four indicators is a time series of land cover information derived from medium (~ 30 m) resolution, Landsat-class sensors. This paper describes a generic, end-to-end change detection framework developed for Park-EIOS, labelled Automated Multi-temporal Updating through Signature Extension (AMUSE). AMUSE involves radiometric normalization steps, production of a baseline land cover, change vector analysis to identify changed pixels, and a new constrained signature extension approach to update the land cover of changed areas. We present the method and results applied to six pilot parks using time series of Landsat TM/ETM+ imagery from 1985–2005.