Four Decades of Land-Cover Change on the Kenai Peninsula, Alaska: Detecting Disturbance-Influenced Vegetation Shifts Using Landsat Legacy Data
Across Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula, disturbance events have removed large areas of forest over the last half century. Simultaneously, succession and landscape evolution have facilitated forest regrowth and expansion. Detecting forest loss within known pulse disturbance events is often straightforward given that reduction in tree cover is a readily detectable and measurable land-cover change. Land-cover change is more difficult to quantify when disturbance events are unknown, remote, or environmental response is slow in relation to human observation.