A spatial pattern analysis of forest loss in the Madre de Dios region, Peru

Over the past decades, the Peruvian Amazon has experienced a rapid change in forest cover due to the expansion of agriculture and extractive activities. This study uses spectral mixture analysis (SMA) in a cloud-computing platform to map forest loss within and outside indigenous territories, protected areas, mining concessions, and reforestation concessions within the Madre de Dios Region in Peru. The study area is focused on key areas of forest loss in the western part of the Tambopata National Reserve and surrounding the Malinowski River. Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager and Landsat 7 Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus surface reflectance data spanning 2013-2018 were analyzed using cloud-based SMA to identify patterns of forest loss for each year. High-resolution Planet Dove (3m) and RapidEye (5m) imagery were used to validate the forest loss map and to identify the potential drivers of loss. Results show large areas of forest loss, especially within buffer zones of protected areas. Forest loss also appears in the Kotsimba Native Community within a 1 km buffer of the Malinowski River. In addition to gold mining, agriculture and pasture fields also appear to be major drivers of forest loss for our study period. This study also suggests that gold mining activity is potentially not restricted to the legal mining concession areas, with 49% of forest loss occurring outside the mining concessions. Overall accuracy obtained for the forest loss analysis was 96%. These results illustrate the applicability of a cloud-based platform not only for land use land cover change detection but also for accessing and processing large datasets; the importance of monitoring not only forest loss progression in the Madre de Dios, which has been increasing over the years, especially within buffer zones, but also its drivers; and reiterates the use of SMA as a reliable change detection classification approach.