Publications

An environmental baseline is the set of conditions that characterizes a place or thing at a particular period in time. It then serves as a benchmark to which future changes can be compared. Environmental baselines have proven extremely valuable in the documentation of the principal bislogical and physical effects of human activity on the habitat.Remote sensing has been shown to be an effective and low cost method to establish environmental baselines. In the current study, Landsat Multispectral Scanner (h4SS) and Thematic Mapper (TM) satellite images were used to assess land cover and land use changes in Central Sumatra from 1973 to 1992. Within a small study area, an MSS scene from 1973 was used to create the environmental baseline. An MSS image from 1979 and a TM image from 1992 were then analyzed to quantify the changes that occurred in various types of land cover. Conversion of the forest to secondary vegetation was the predominant change that occurred in the study area in that time period.