Dirk Pflugmacher

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Senior Researcher at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

This study introduces a novel approach for mapping annual fractional vegetation cover in Sub-Saharan range-lands. We used Sentinel-2 time series data from October 2022 to October 2023 to derive phenological metrics, including the dry season integral and rate of greenness decline after peak season. Phenological metrics effectively separate woody veg...

Context Evidence for declines in insect populations is growing with climate change being one suspected driver. Forests, however, are still underrepresented in the relevant research. Recent droughts (2018–2020) have severely affected forests in Central Europe and have been linked to declines in carabid abundance, biomass as well as changes in specie...

Natural disturbances are important drivers of forest dynamics, and canopy gaps are their fingerprints in forest ecosystems. Gaps form and persist because of the interplay of tree mortality and regeneration. They can have long‐lasting impacts on ecosystems, yet the temporal dynamics of gap formation and closure remains poorly quantified. We analysed...

Spatially explicit and detailed information on tree species composition is critical for forest management, nature conservation and the assessment of forest ecosystem services. In many countries, forest attributes are monitored regularly through sample-based forest inventories. In combination with satellite imagery, data from such forest inventories...

The Landsat archive is one of the richest Earth observation datasets available and provides long-term data at fairly high temporal and spatial resolution globally. Temporal aggregation is frequently used to condense single observations into a more digestible feature space that provides spatially gap-free data to fulfill demands of many processing s...

Land cover and land use change monitoring is fundamental for ecosystem services, global biodiversity, food security, and climate change analyses. To provide management relevant information, land cover and land use change analyses need to be carried out at suitable spatial and temporal scales. Remote sensing data are an outstanding source of informa...

Monitoring agricultural systems becomes increasingly important in the context of global challenges like climate change, biodiversity loss, population growth, and the rising demand for agricultural products. High-resolution, national-scale maps of agricultural land are needed to develop strategies for future sustainable agriculture. However, the cha...

Precise information on tree species composition is critical for forest management and conservation, but mapping tree species with satellite data over large areas is still a challenge. Since 2017, Sentinel-2A/B provide multi-spectral time series with global coverage at an unprecedented spatial and temporal resolution. This is a new opportunity for m...

Forest aboveground biomass (AGB) is a critical measure of ecosystem structure and plays a key role in global carbon cycling. Due to its widespread availability, optical remotely sensed data are key for regional- and global-scale AGB assessment, and with the planned and recent launches of spaceborne imaging spectroscopy missions such as the Environm...

Forest loss in the tropics affects large areas, but whereas full forest conversions are routinely assessed, forest degradation patters remain often unclear. This is particularly so for the world’s tropical dry forests, where remote sensing of forest disturbances is challenging due to high canopy complexity, strong phenology and climate variability,...

Disturbances play a key role in driving forest ecosystem dynamics, but how disturbances shape wildlife habitat across space and time often remains unclear. A major reason for this is a lack of information about changes in habitat suitability across large areas and longer time periods. Here, we use a novel approach based on Landsat satellite image t...

Long-term monitoring of the extent and intensity of irrigation systems is needed to track crop water consumption and to adapt land use to a changing climate. We mapped the expansion and changes in the intensity of irrigated dry season cropping in Turkey´s Southeastern Anatolia Project annually from 1990 to 2018 using Landsat time series. Irrigated...

Vegetation phenology has a great impact on land-atmosphere interactions like carbon cycling, albedo, and water and energy exchanges. To understand and predict these critical land-atmosphere feedbacks, it is crucial to measure and quantify phenological responses to climate variability, and ultimately climate change. Coarse-resolution sensors such as...

Up‐to‐date and fine‐scale habitat information is essential for managing and conserving wildlife. Studies assessing wildlife habitat commonly rely on categorical land‐cover maps as predictors in habitat models. However, broad land‐cover categories often do not adequately capture key habitat features and generating robust land‐cover maps is challengi...

Vegetation phenology has a great impact on land-atmosphere interactions like carbon cycling, albedo, and water and energy exchanges. To understand and predict these critical land-atmosphere feedbacks, it is crucial to measure and quantify phenological responses to climate variability, and ultimately climate change. Coarse-resolution sensors such as...

Global human population growth, limited space for settlements and a booming tourism industry have led to a strong increase of human infrastructure in mountain regions. As this infrastructure is highly exposed to natural hazards, a main role of mountain forests is to regulate the environment and reduce hazard probability. However, canopy disturbance...

The Earth's surface is continuously observed by satellites, leading to large multi-spectral image data sets of increasing spatial resolution and temporal density. One important application of satellite data is the mapping of land cover and land use changes such as urbanization, deforestation, and desertification. This information should be obtained...

Up‐to‐date and fine‐scale habitat information is essential for managing and conserving wildlife. Studies assessing wildlife habitat commonly rely on categorical land‐cover maps as predictors in habitat models. However, broad land‐cover categories often do not adequately capture key habitat features and generating robust land‐cover maps is challengi...

Accurate information regarding forest tree species composition is useful for a wide range of applications, both for forest management and scientific research. Remote sensing is an efficient tool for collecting spatially explicit information on forest attributes. With the launch of the Sentinel-2 mission, new opportunities have arisen for mapping tr...

With the launch of the Sentinel-2 satellites, a European capacity has been created to ensure continuity of Landsat and SPOT observations. In contrast to previous sensors, Sentinel-2′s multispectral imager (MSI) incorporates three additional spectral bands in the red-edge (RE) region, which are expected to improve the mapping of vegetation traits. T...

This study analyzed, for the first time, the potential of combining the large European-wide land survey LUCAS (Land Use/Cover Area frame Survey) and Landsat-8 data for mapping pan-European land cover and land use. We used annual and seasonal spectral-temporal metrics and environmental features to map 12 land cover and land use classes across Europe...

Tropical forests continue to undergo a rapid transformation. The expansion of rubber tree (Hevea brasiliensis) plantations has been reported as a major driver of forest loss, linked to a boom in market demand. Distant commodity markets have spurred a surge of large-scale economic land concessions granted throughout tropical Southeast Asia. Using sa...

Mortality is a key indicator of forest health, and increasing mortality can serve as bellwether for the impacts of global change on forest ecosystems. Here we analyze trends in forest canopy mortality between 1984 and 2016 over more than 30 Mill. ha of temperate forests in Europe, based on a unique dataset of 24,000 visually interpreted spectral tr...

Mortality is a key indicator of forest health, and increasing mortality can serve as bellwether for the impacts of global change on forest ecosystems. Here we analyze trends in forest canopy mortality between 1984 and 2016 over more than 30 Mill. ha of temperate forests in Europe, based on a unique dataset of 24,000 visually interpreted spectral tr...

Forest reference levels (FRLs) provide a benchmark for assessing reduced emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+), and they are central to demonstrate additionality of REDD+. Attaining realistic FRLs, however, is challenging, especially in complex mosaic landscapes. We established FRLs in northern Laos for different reference per...

During the past decades, overuse of land resources has increasingly contributed to environmental crises in China. To mitigate wide-spread land degradation, actions have been taken to maintain and restore ecologically valuable landscapes such as natural forests. However, the effects of the various vegetation protection policies that have been implem...

Remote sensing is a key information source for improving the spatiotemporal understanding of forest ecosystem dynamics. Yet, the mapping and attribution of forest change remains challenging, particularly in areas where a number of interacting disturbance agents simultaneously affect forest development. The forest ecosystems of Central Europe are co...

The attribution of forest disturbances to disturbance agents is a critical challenge for remote sensing-based forest monitoring, promising important insights into drivers and impacts of forest disturbances. Previous studies have used spectral-temporal metrics derived from annual Landsat time series to identify disturbance agents. Here, we extend th...

Despite rapid advances and large-scale initiatives in forest mapping, reliable cross-border information about the status of forest resources in Central Asian countries is lacking. We produced consistent Central Asia forest cover (CAFC) maps based on a cost-efficient approach using multi-resolution satellite imagery from Landsat and MODIS during 200...

Context: Forest insect outbreaks are influenced by ecological processes operating at multiple spatial scales, including host-insect interactions within stands and across landscapes that are modified by regional-scale variations in climate. These drivers of outbreak dynamics are not well understood for the western spruce budworm, a defoliator that i...

Phenology is a key indicator of vegetation response to global climate change, though our understanding of the underlying functional relationships is yet limited. Consequently, we aim at shedding light on the controls on the spatial and temporal patterns of European beech (Fagus sylvatica) phenology by utilizing a novel Landsat based hierarchical mo...

Tropical environments present a unique challenge for optical time series analysis, primarily owing to fragmented data availability, persistent cloud cover and atmospheric aerosols. Additionally, little is known of whether the performance of time series change detection is affected by diverse forest types found in tropical dry regions. In this paper...

Monitoring changes in land use intensity of grazing systems in the Amazon is an important prerequisite to study the complex political and socioeconomic forces driving Amazonian deforestation. Remote sensing offers the potential to map pasture vegetation over large areas, but mapping pasture conditions consistently through time is not a trivial task...

Free and open access to satellite imagery and value-added data products have revolutionized the role of remote sensing in Earth system science. Nonetheless, rapid changes in the global environment pose challenges to the science community that are increasingly difficult to address using data from single satellite sensors or platforms due to the unde...

Global population growth, changing lifestyles and related consumption patterns create an increasing demand for goods and services related to global land use. Human land use hence is a major driver of global change, interacting with and often amplifying effects of climate change. Land use change and land use intensification are multi-faceted, includ...

The recent rise in global demand for natural rubber (Hevea brasiliensis) has led to expansive areas of natural forest being transformed into monoculture plantations. This paper explores the utility of annual Landsat time series for monitoring forest disturbance and the role of natural rubber in mainland Southeast Asia from 2000 to 2012. A region on...

Background Estimation of forest biomass on the regional and global scale is of great importance. Many studies have demonstrated that lidar is an accurate tool for estimating forest aboveground biomass. However, results vary with forest types, terrain conditions and the quality of the lidar data. Methods In this study, we investigated the utility...

Dense time series of optical remote sensing data have long been the domain of broad-scale sensors with daily near-global coverage, such as the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR), the Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS), the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MODIS) or the Satellite Pour l’Observation de la Terre (SPO...

Mapping land use and land cover change (LULCC) over large areas at regular time intervals is a key requisite to improve our understanding of dynamic land systems. In this study, we developed and tested an automated approach for mapping land use and land cover changes at annual time intervals using data from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrora...

When characterizing the processes that shape ecosystems, ecologists increasingly use the unique perspective offered by repeat observations of remotely sensed imagery. However, the concept of change embodied in much of the traditional remote-sensing literature was primarily limited to capturing large or extreme changes occurring in natural systems,...

Improved monitoring of forest biomass and biomass change is needed to quantify natural and anthropogenic effects on the terrestrial carbon cycle. Landsat's temporal and spatial coverage, moderate spatial resolution, and long history of earth observations provide a unique opportunity for characterizing vegetation changes across large areas and long...

Forest biomass is a major store of carbon and thus plays an important role in the regional and global carbon cycle. Accurate forest carbon sequestration assessment requires estimation of both forest biomass and forest biomass dynamics over time. Forest dynamics are characterized by disturbances and recovery, key processes affecting site productivit...

We developed and evaluated a new approach for mapping rubber plantations and natural forests in one of Southeast Asia’s biodiversity hot spots, Xishuangbanna in China. We used a one-year annual time series of Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS), Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI) and short-wave infrared (SWIR) reflectance data to dev...

Detailed information from global remote sensing has greatly advanced our understanding of Earth as a system in general and of agricultural processes in particular. Vegetation monitoring with global remote sensing systems over long time periods is critical to gain a better understanding of processes related to agricultural change over long time peri...

Lidar is currently the most accurate method for remote estimation of forest structure, but it has limited spatial and temporal coverage. Conversely, Landsat data are more widely available, but exhibit a weaker relationship with structure under medium to high leaf area conditions. One potentially valuable means of enhancing the relationship between...

International climate negotiations have stressed the importance of considering emissions from forest degradation under the planned REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation + enhancing forest carbon stocks) mechanism. However, most research, pilot-REDD+ projects and carbon certification agencies have focused on deforestati...

Interactions between landuse and ecosystem change are complex, especially in riparian zones. To date, few models are available to project the influence of alternative landuse practices, natural disturbance and plant succession on the likely future conditions of riparian zones and aquatic habitats across large spatial extents. A state and transition...

Ecosystems change continuously through internal processes, such as succession and growth, and external processes, such as wildfire or urbanization. Considered the workhorse of landscape monitoring, the Landsat sensors have long provided imagery to examine the manifestations of those processes by comparing landscapes before and after change. With th...

Arctic land cover and land use in a changing climate, 79 - 108 This volume is a compilation of studies on interactions of land-cover/land-use change with climate in a region where the climate warming is most pronounced compared to other areas of the globe. The climate warming in the far North, and in the Arctic region of Northern Eurasia in particu...

Accurate estimation of live and dead biomass in forested ecosystems is important for studies of carbon dynamics, biodiversity, wildfire behavior, and for forest management. Lidar remote sensing has been used successfully to estimate live biomass, but studies focusing on dead biomass are rare. We used lidar data, in conjunction with field measuremen...

Interest in preserving older forests at the landscape level has increased in many regions, including the Pacific Northwest of the United States. The Northwest Forest Plan (NWFP) of 1994 initiated a significant reduction in the harvesting of older forests on federal land. We used historical satellite imagery to assess the effect of this reduction in...

Accurate estimates of forest aboveground biomass are needed to reduce uncertainties in global and regional terrestrial carbon fluxes. In this study we investigated the utility of the Geoscience Laser Altimeter System (GLAS) onboard the Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite for large-scale biomass inventories. GLAS is the first spaceborne lidar se...

Riassunto La stima della biomassa forestale per l'inventario di carbonio ha acquisito importanza notevole in seguito alla convenzione sul clima e al protocollo di Kyoto. Molti studi hanno dimostrato che il LiDAR può essere usato come uno strumento preciso per la stima della biomassa forestale. Tuttavia, i risultati variano a seconda tipi di foresta...

Boreal peatlands play a major role in carbon and water cycling and other global environmental processes but understanding this role is constrained by inconsistent representation of peatlands on, or omission from, many global land cover maps. The comparison of several widely used global and continental-scale databases on peatland distribution with a...

Earth observation with Landsat and other moderate resolution sensors is a vital component of a wide variety of applications across disciplines. Despite the widespread success of the Landsat program, recent problems with Landsat 5 and Landsat 7 create uncertainty about the future of moderate resolution remote sensing. Several other Landsat-like sens...

Peatlands play a major role in the global carbon cycle but are largely overlooked in current large-scale vegetation mapping efforts. In this study, we investigated the potential of the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) to capture the extent and distribution of peatlands in the St. Petersburg region of Russia by analyzing the rel...

Global maps of land cover and leaf area index (LAI) derived from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MODIS) reflectance data are an important resource in studies of global change, but errors in these must be characterized and well understood. Product validation requires careful scaling from ground and related measurements to a grain comme...

Although peatlands cover only about 3 percent of our planet's land and freshwater surface, they play a major role in the global carbon cycle. Despite their importance, peatlands are largely overlooked in current large-scale vegetation mapping efforts. In this study, we investigated the potential of the MODIS sensor to capture extent and distributio...