Reliable assessment of forest resource stock, productivity and harvesting is a commonly agreed objective of
environmental monitoring programs. Distinctively, the assessment of wood harvesting has become even more
relevant to evaluate the sustainability of forest management and to quantify forest carbon budget. This paper
presents the development and testing of procedures for assessing forest harvesting in coppice forests by very high
resolution (VHR) satellite imagery. The study area is located in central Italy over approximately 34,000 km2. A set
of SPOT5 HRG multispectral images was acquired for the study years (2002–2007). Official administrative
statistics of coppice clearcutswere also acquired.More than 9500 clearcuts weremapped and dated by on-screen
interpretation of the SPOT5 images. In a subset of the study area various methods for semi-automatic clearcut
mapping were tested by pixel- and object-oriented approaches. The following results are presented: (i) clearcut
map developed by visual interpretation of the SPOT5 images resulted in high thematic (overall accuracy of 0.99)
and geometric (rootmean square error of clearcut boundary delineation of 5.3 m) reliability; (ii) object-oriented
approach achieved significantly better accuracy than pixel-based methods for semi-automatic classification of
the coppice clearcuts; (iii) comparison between mapped clearcut area and official forest harvesting statistics
proved a significant underestimation by the latter (65% of the total mapped clearcut area). A sample-based
procedure exploiting VHR satellite imagery is finally proposed to correct the official statistics of coppice clearcuts.L'articolo è disponibile sul sito dell'editore www.sciencedirect.co
