Revealing long term land use and land cover change in a severely disturbed environment

[Abstract]: Land use and land cover change (LUCC) is one of the important drivers of environmental change on all spatial and temporal scales. LUCC contributes significantly to earth atmosphere interactions, forest fragmentation, and biodiversity loss. It has become one of the major issues for environmental change monitoring and natural resource management. This study aims to reveal the long term land use and land cover changes (from 1939 to 2004) in the Strzelecki Ranges, Victoria, Australia by integrating remote sensing and geographical information system (GIS) and to provide quantitative analysis of LUCC information in the area. The land use and land cover is derived from historical aerial photography with the support of Vicmap Elevation, Ecological Vegetation Classes (EVCs) map and stereo models established by using stereo pair of aerial photographs. The EVC map provides a good ground truth not only for the 2004 imagery, but also is part of the reference for interpreting 1988, 1972, 1954 and 1939 orthoimages. The interpretation was carried out with respect to the forest canopy patterns that appeared on the imagery, relationships with other land covers, and DEM derived attributes such as aspects and slope declivity. The results show that land use and land cover in this area changed substantially from 1939 to 2004. Large areas of cleared land and natural forest regrowth on previously cleared land were gradually converted to plantations. The area covered by cool temperate rainforest has remained relatively stable throughout the period