Forest is defined as 'land spanning more than 0.5 hectares with trees higher than 5 meters and a canopy cover of more than 10 percent, or trees able to reach these thresholds in situ. It does not include land that is predominantly under agricultural or urban land use' (FAO 2010, Global Forest Resources Assessment 2010 Main report).
This is a tutorial about the land cover monitoring of forests, using the Semi-Automatic Classification Plugin for QGIS. In particular, we are going to classify two Landsat images acquired over the Amazon Rainforest, in RondĂ´nia (Brazil), in 1985 and 2013.
Before the tutorial, please watch the following video that illustrates the study area and provides very useful information about the deforestation (by ESA Earth from Space which broadcasts new videos every Friday). Also, a description and an animation of the area that we are going to classify is available here.