Conservation International has mapped changes in forest cover in the Philippines over large areas in two biodiversity corridors, as defined by the Critical Ecosystems Partnership Fund (CEPF). These changes were derived by analyzing Landsat satellite imagery at a spatial resolution of 28.5 m. The dataset analyzed includes Landsat 5 data from circa 1990 (+/- 3 years) and Landsat 7 data from circa 2000. Image dates were determined based on the availability of free, nearly cloud-free imagery from the University of Maryland’s Global Land Cover Facility (http://glcf.umiacs.umd.edu/index.shtml). Additional scenes were also purchased for areas most heavily covered with clouds. A supervised classification approach was employed, using a decision tree classifier. The total amount of forest cleared during the time period was 20.1 km2 in the Eastern Mindanao corridor and 37.5
km2 in the Palawan biodiversity corridor, representing an average annual forest clearance rate of 0.04 percent for Eastern Mindanao and 0.07 percent for Palawan. Forest fragmentation was also observed to be more apparent in Palawan due to clearance of smaller forest patches. Forest cover interpretation from the Landsat imagery was validated
through a collective aerial system of videography and photography. The combined accuracy of the classified maps was 85.4 percent.