Grant McCartney

The Nagagamisis Central Plateau located in northern Ontario, Canada is an area of distinct natural and cultural significance in the Boreal shield ecosystem. The importance of this land was officially recognized in 1957 through the establishment of Nagagamisis Provincial Park Reserve. Since its inception, the park has experienced significant expansion and is currently under development as one of Ontario Parks ‘Signature Sites’. Since the 1980’s, timber harvest activity has led to widespread forest disturbance just outside of the park boundaries. Remote sensing provides a cost effective method for monitoring forest disturbance in vast remote areas, and can contribute insight to policy and management objectives. This research is focused on the detection of stand level forest disturbances associated with timber harvest occurring near Nagagamisis Provincial Park. The image time series data selected for this project is Landsat TM and ETM+; spanning a twenty-seven year period from 1984 to 2009. The Tasselled Cap Transformation and Normalized Difference Moisture Index are derived for use in unsupervised image classification to determine the land cover for each image scene in the time series. Image band differencing and raster arithmetic are performed to create disturbance maps illustrating the size and spatial distribution of stand level forest disturbances between image dates. A total area of 1649 square kilometres or 26.1% of the study area has experienced stand level disturbance over the twenty-seven year study period.