Land cover changes, especially excessive economic forest plantations, have significantly threatened the ecological security of West Dongting Lake wetland in China. This work aimed to investigate the spatiotemporal dynamics of forests in the West Dongting Lake region from 2000 to 2018 using a reconstructed monthly Landsat NDVI time series. The multi-type forest changes, including conversion from forest to another land cover category, conversion from another land cover category to forest, and conversion from forest to forest (such as flooding and replantation post-deforestation), and land cover categories before and after change were effectively detected by integrating Breaks For Additive Seasonal and Trend (BFAST) and random forest algorithms with the monthly NDVI time series, with an overall accuracy of 87.8%. On the basis of focusing on all the forest regions extracted through creating a forest mask for each image in time series and merging these to produce an ‘anytime’ forest mask, the spatiotemporal dynamics of forest were analyzed on the basis of the acquired information of multi-type forest changes and classification. The forests are principally distributed in the core zone of West Donting Lake surrounding the water body and the southwestern mountains. The forest changes in the core zone and low elevation region are prevalent and frequent. The variation of forest areas in West Dongting Lake experienced three steps: rapid expansion of forest plantation from 2000 to 2005, relatively steady from 2006 to 2011, and continuous decline since 2011, mainly caused by anthropogenic factors, such as government policies and economic profits. This study demonstrated the applicability of the integrated BFAST method to detect multi-type forest changes by using dense Landsat time series in the subtropical wetland ecosystem with low data availability.

Heavy metal stress in crops is a worldwide problem that requires accurate and timely monitoring. This study aimed to improve the accuracy of monitoring heavy metal stress levels in rice by using multiple Sentinel-2 images. The selected study areas are in Zhuzhou City, Hunan Province, China. Six Sentinel-2 images were acquired in 2017, and heavy metal concentrations in soil were measured. A novel vegetation index called heavy metal stress sensitive index (HMSSI) was proposed. HMSSI is the ratio between two red-edge spectral indices, namely the red-edge chlorophyll index (CI_red-edge) and the plant senescence reflectance index (PSRI). To demonstrate the capability of HMSSI, the performances of CI_red-edge and PSRI in discriminating heavy metal stress levels were compared with that of HMSSI at different growth stages. Random forest (RF) was used to establish a multitemporal monitoring model to detect heavy metal stress levels in rice based on HMSSI at different growth stages. Results show that HMSSI is more sensitive to heavy metal stress than CI_red-edge and PSRI at different growth stages. The performance of a multitemporal monitoring model combining the whole growth stage images was better than any other single growth stage in distinguishing heavy metal stress levels. Therefore, HMSSI can be regarded as an indicator for monitoring heavy metal stress levels with a multitemporal monitoring model.

To accurately describe dynamic vegetation changes, high temporal and spectral resolution data are urgently required. Optical images contain rich spectral information but are limited by poor weather conditions and cloud contamination. Conversely, synthetic-aperture radar (SAR) is effective under all weather conditions but contains insufficient spectral information to recognize certain vegetation changes. Conditional adversarial networks (cGANs) can be adopted to transform SAR images (Sentinel-1) into optical images (Landsat8), which exploits the advantages of both optical and SAR images. As the features of SAR and optical remote sensing data play a decisive role in the translation process, this study explores the quantitative impact of edge information and polarization (VV, VH, VV&VH) on the peak signal-to-noise ratio, structural similarity index measure, correlation coefficient (r), and root mean squared error. The addition of edge information improves the structural similarity between generated and real images. Moreover, using the VH and VV&VH polarization modes as the input provides the cGANs with more effective information and results in better image quality. The optimal polarization mode with the addition of edge information is VV&VH, whereas that without edge information is VV. Near-infrared and short-wave infrared bands in the generated image exhibit higher accuracy (r > 0.8) than visible light bands. The conclusions of this study could serve as an important reference for selecting cGANs input features, and as a potential reference for the applications of cGANs to the SAR-to-optical translation of other multi-source remote sensing data.

Mapping forest disturbances using dense time series can timely identify disturbances at the subannual scale. However, these change detection methods using dense time series may be infeasible when not enough temporal observations are available. In this article, an online change detection algorithm that identifies forest disturbances at a subannual scale using spatial context from the sparse Landsat time series was proposed. First, the spatial normalized index that removed forest seasonality was prepared for establishing a simplified model instead of the harmonic model, thereby reducing the requirements for a high temporal frequency of clear observations for model initialization. Second, by using the spatial errors model to establish the simplified model, the normally distributed residual time series that removed the spatial autocorrelation were obtained. Third, the spatial statistic $t$ time series transformed from residual time series within a $3\times3$ spatial window were subsequently subjected to the exponentially weighted moving average $t$ chart (EWMA-t), which is a statistical process control chart for a short cycle corresponding to sparse Landsat time series. Fourth, disturbed pixels were labeled if the chart values persistently deviated from the control limits of the chart. The proposed algorithm was applied to a subtropical forest with low Landsat data availability and yielded an overall accuracy of 86% in the spatial domain and temporal accuracy of 93.7%, achieving accurate and timely identification of forest disturbances. The proposed method called the EWMA-t change detection (EWMATCD) algorithm provides an alternative for disturbance detection at the subannual scale in regions with low data availability.

Heavy metal stress, which is a serious environmental problem, affects both animal and human health through the food chain. However, such subtle stress information is difficult to detect in remote sensing images. Therefore, enhancing the stress signal is key to accurately identifying heavy metal contamination in crops. The aim of this study was to identify heavy metal stress in rice at a regional scale by mining the time-series characteristics of rice growth under heavy metal stress using the gated recurrent unit (GRU) algorithm. The experimental area was located in Zhuzhou City, Hunan Province, China. We collected situ-measured data and Sentinel-2A images corresponding to the 2019–2021 period. First, the spatial distribution of the rice in the study area was extracted using the random forest algorithm based on the Sentinel 2 images. Second, the time-series characteristics were analyzed, sensitive parameters were selected, and a GRU classification model was constructed. Third, the model was used to identify the heavy metals in rice and then assess the accuracy of the classification results using performance metrics such as the accuracy rate, precision, recall rate (recall), and F1-score (F1-score). The results showed that the GRU model based on the time series of the red-edge location feature index has a good classification performance with an overall accuracy of 93.5% and a Kappa coefficient of 85.6%. This study shows that regional heavy metal stress in crops can be accurately detected using the GRU algorithm. A combination of spectrum and temporal information appears to be a promising method for monitoring crops under various types of stress.