Multitemporal Kauth-Thomas change detection of the Appalachain Trail Corridor in 17 New England counties

The Appalachian Trail (AT) is a continuous scenic footpath that stretches 3,400 km from Maine to Georgia. This analysis provides much-needed land cover change information to conservation efforts along the trail corridor. The study area is a 16 km-wide, 1,339,495 ha corridor centered the AT and the five New England states (ME, NH, VT, CT, and MA). Ten circa-1990 and circa-2000 scenes (fixe per date) from NASA´s global orthorectified Landsat data set provided cloud-free coverage. Multitemporal (1990/2000) Kauth-Thomas and 1990 single-date Kauth-Thomas transforms served as inputs in a two-tiered unsupervised classification scheme (k-means). Analysts identified a disturbed natural vegetation class that was spatially and spectrally distinct from agricultural crop cycles, drought, and disease. Overall disturbance for New England from 1990-2000 is estimated at 28,383 ha, 2.17% of total corridor land. Preliminary fine resolution disturbance maps and county-level statistics have been useful to both the National Park Service and the Appalachian Trail Council.