Broad-scale spatial pattern of forest landscape types in the Guiana Shield

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jag.2011.01.004Get rights and content

Abstract

Detecting broad scale spatial patterns across the South American rainforest biome is still a major challenge. Although several countries do possess their own, more or less detailed land-cover map, these are based on classifications that appear largely discordant from a country to another. Up to now, continental scale remote sensing studies failed to fill this gap. They mostly result in crude representations of the rainforest biome as a single, uniform vegetation class, in contrast with open vegetations. A few studies identified broad scale spatial patterns, but only when they managed to map a particular forest characteristic such as biomass. The main objective of this study is to identify, characterize and map distinct forest landscape types within the evergreen lowland rainforest at the sub-continental scale of the Guiana Shield (north-east tropical South-America 10° North-2° South; 66° West-50° West). This study is based on the analysis of a 1-year daily data set (from January 1st to December 31st, 2000) from the VEGETATION sensor onboard the SPOT-4 satellite (1-km spatial resolution). We interpreted remotely sensed landscape classes (RSLC) from field and high resolution remote sensing data of 21 sites in French Guiana. We cross-analyzed remote sensing data, field observations and environmental data using multivariate analysis. We obtained 33 remotely sensed landscape classes (RSLC) among which five forest-RSLC representing 78% of the forested area. The latter were classified as different broad forest landscape types according to a gradient of canopy openness. Their mapping revealed a new and meaningful broad-scale spatial pattern of forest landscape types. At the scale of the Guiana Shield, we observed a spatial patterns similarity between climatic and forest landscape types. The two most open forest-RSLCs were observed mainly within the north-west to south-east dry belt. The three other forest-RSLCs were observed in wetter and less anthropized areas, particularly in the newly recognized “Guianan dense forest arch”. Better management and conservation policies, as well as improvement of biological and ecological knowledge, require accurate and stable representations of the geographical components of ecosystems. Our results represent a decisive step in this way for the Guiana Shield area and contribute to fill one of the major shortfall in the knowledge of tropical forests.

Research highlights

► We identity five remotely sensed landscape classes (RSLC) in Guiana Shield forests. ► Forest RSLCs differ by their canopy openness. ► Distributions of forest RSLCs mainly fit with climatic gradients. ► The Guianan dense forest arch is the most telling pattern revealed by our study.

Introduction

At a time when Amazonian tropical rainforests are undergoing profound and rapid changes (Laurance et al., 2001), characterizing their spatial organisation is of major importance for analysing land-use changes and promoting sustainable management of forest resources. From a conservation point of view, the question arises as to how far large protected areas actually encompass the diversity of forest ecosystems. Landscape is a key concept at a key scale for sustainable management, but is not fully taken into consideration by ecologists and managers.

A landscape is an area that is spatially heterogeneous in at least one factor of interest (Turner, 2005). Consequently, landscape elements may be defined as homogeneous areas with respect to a set of factors of interest. Following Forman and Godron (1986), we define landscape types as a recognisable combinations and proportions of landscape elements. The mapping of such landscape types across large areas allow to detect what we call here the spatial pattern of landscape types. Our study focuses on the forest landscapes types of the Guiana Shield area.

At local scale, many authors have described an impressive number of landscape elements with specific typologies according to their structure (i.e. density and size-frequency distribution of stems, canopy structure, and floristics) either from field observations (Pires and Prance, 1985), quantitative measurements (Clark and Clark, 2000) or from high or very high spatial resolution satellite imagery (Lu et al., 2003, Johansen et al., 2007). All these studies involved a context-dependent typology and a fine scale resolution, both inaccurate for the mapping of large trends in the variations of vegetation cover.

At regional scale, maps of forest landscape types have been based on broad environmental classes rather than on actual vegetation characteristics. The pioneering RADAMBRASIL and its improvements (Veloso et al., 1991, IBGE, 1992) was the first attempt to map the spatial distribution of native landscape types in Brazil, mostly based on proxies of their determinant factors such as altitudinal classes. Similar approaches have been used in the Guiana Shield countries (Guyana: ter Steege, 2001, Huber et al., 1995; Suriname: Ravillous, 2000; French Guiana: Girou, 2001), combining in so different ways high resolution remote sensing (typically 30 m spatial resolution from Landsat imagery) and field data that they are mostly not compatible and unable to produce a global view of the spatial pattern of forest landscape types.

At continental scale, according to remote sensing, the forest is clearly distinguished from other biomes (e.g. savannas, wetlands, shrubland, and agriculture; Friedl et al., 2002, Bartholomé et al., 2004) but the resulting vegetation maps display tropical rainforests as a uniform broad-leaved evergreen forest class and fail to distinguish any distinctive forest landscape type within (South America: Eva et al., 2004; Asia: Stibig et al., 2007; Africa: Mayaux et al., 2004). On the contrary, studies based on scattered, but detailed field measurements identified clear patterns of species diversity, (ter Steege et al., 2000), life traits (ter Steege et al., 2006), or aboveground biomass (Malhi et al., 2006, Saatchi et al., 2007), thus strongly suggesting the existence of such distinctive types. Therefore, depicting such geographical structure in the forest vegetation cover from continuous data is of major interest, because it would provide key elements to support forest conservation and management policies. The objective of this study is to identify, characterize and map distinct forest landscape types within the evergreen lowland rainforest at the sub-continental scale of the Guiana Shield.

Section snippets

Location

The Guiana Shield covers 2.3 million km2 and is located on the north-eastern part of continental South America. The study area lies between latitude 11° North and 4° South, and between longitude 48° and 58° West. The climate is tropical with annual precipitation ranging from 1500 to 4000 mm and mean annual temperatures ranging from 25 °C to 30 °C (Hammond, 2005). The number of consecutive months with less than 100 mm precipitation varies from 0 to 7 (Sombroek, 2001). The altitude ranges from 0 to 3000

Results

The spectral classification yielded 33 remotely sensed landscape classes (RSLC) hereafter numbered from the lowest (RSLC-1) to the highest (RSLC-33) reflectance values (Table 3). Twelve main groups of RSLC were identified (Fig. 3) corresponding to the main landscape types. Among these, RSLC-2–13 correspond to the wide variety of continental aquatic environments and their associated landscape types, to which periodically flooded open areas (RSLC-27, -29, -31 and -33) are spatially linked. Four

Discussion

The main result of our study is to show, for the first time, a large scale spatial pattern of five distinct forest landscape types within the evergreen lowland forests of the Guiana Shield, using remote sensing data. This result greatly improves our vision of tropical forests because so far, at continental scale, lowland tropical rainforests were either mapped as a single homogeneous class (namely tropical lowland forest or broadleaved evergreen tropical forest) (Eva et al., 2004 for Amazonia,

Conclusion

The main interest of this study was to provide a homogeneous view of forest landscape types and to reveal a broad spatial pattern within the tropical evergreen forest at the scale of the Guiana Shield. This spatial pattern appears to be linked to climatic conditions. Identifying spatial pattern of forest landscape types is crucial for the improvement of management and conservation strategies (Bush and Lovejoy, 2007). The ability to identify spatial pattern could significantly improve the carbon

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES) and the European Commission Joint Research Centre for allowing us access to Spot-4/VEGETATION data sets. Thanks to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) for providing the Shuttle Radar Terra Mission (SRTM) data set. This study was funded by the 12th Contrat de Plan Etat-Région of French Guiana (CAREFOR project) and by the French Overseas Ministry. All participants are thanked for their contributions

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    Current address: Joint Research Centre of the European Commission, Global Environement Monitoring Unit (GEM), Via E. Fermi, 2749 I-21027 Ispra (Va) Italy.

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