Tracking cropland change and its spatiotemporal characteristics can provide a scientific basis for assessments of ecological restoration in reclamation areas. In 1998, an ecological restoration project (Converting Farmland to Lake) was launched in Dongting Lake, China, in which original lake areas reclaimed for cropland were converted back to lake or to poplar cultivation areas. This study characterized the resulting long-term (1998–2018) change patterns using the LandTrendr algorithm with Landsat time-series data derived from the Google Earth Engine (GEE). Of the total cropland affected, ~447.48 km² was converted to lake and 499.9 km² was converted to poplar cultivation, with overall accuracies of 87.0% and 83.8%, respectively. The former covered a wider range, mainly distributed in the area surrounding Datong Lake, while the latter was more clustered in North and West Dongting Lake. Our methods based on GEE captured cropland change information efficiently, providing data (raster maps, yearly data, and change attributes) that can assist researchers and managers in gaining a better understanding of environmental influences related to the ongoing conversion efforts in this region.

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.

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.