An updated delineation of stand ages of deciduous rubber plantations during 1987-2018 using Landsat-derived bi-temporal thresholds method in an anti-chronological strategy

Timely and accurately monitoring stand ages of deciduous rubber plantations is of great importance for ecological studies and plantations management. The re-establishment of rubber plantations usually experiences a short period (several years) of land clearance and transplantation of rubber seedlings, along with a noticeable landscape change from well-grown forest to bare land and sparse vegetation in situ. With Landsat times series (LTS) data of four commonly-used vegetation indices (VIs), namely the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI), Normalized Difference Moisture Index (NDMI), and Normalized Burn Ratio (NBR), and three non-visible spectral bands, i.e. the near-infrared (NIR) and shortwave-infrared (SWIR1/2), in this study, an approach by combining the inter-annual defoliating and foliating features of rubber trees and the intra-annual landscape changes of rubber plantations was presented to detect and map stand ages of deciduous rubber plantations in an anti-chronological manner across Xishuangbanna between 1987 and 2018, one of the most intensive regions of deciduous rubber plantations within the tropics. The approach highlighted the repeated distribution of newly-cleared and replanted plot (NCRP) of rubber seedlings due to rubber management. It applied the bi-temporal VIs thresholds of zero of NBR and NDMI during the defoliation to foliation phases to delineate the stand ages of deciduous rubber plantations at an interval of five years, by combining a Landsat-based rubber map in 2018 and 32-year NCRPs as well as quadri-classified age-groups and seven sub-categories (i.e. ≤5 as infantile rubber plantations (IRP), 6–10 as young rubber plantations (YRP), 11–15 and 16–20 as mature rubber plantations (MRP), 21–25, 26–30, and ≥31 years as old rubber plantations (ORP)). The results showed that the areas of IRP, YRP, MRP, and ORP were 19.1 km², 817.1 km², 1681.7 km², and 573.7 km² in 2018, respectively. Spatially, the YRP are mainly around the outskirts of two county-level administrative centers (Jinghong and Mengla), while ORP primarily distributed along main roads. Nearly 53.9% of ORP, 51.8% of IRP, 47.3% of MRP and 46.3% of YRP were in Jinghong City, and Mengla County had 50.5% of YRP, 48.8% of MRP, 42.4% of IRP and 36.3% of ORP. This study demonstrates that the bi-temporal VIs thresholds method (i.e. NBR_defoliation <0, NDMI_defoliation <0, NBR_foliation <0, and NDMI_foliation <0) have great potential for detecting stand ages of deciduous rubber plantations.