Aparats de deteccion forestal

PREFACE
"Individuals who break through by proposing a new paradigm are almost
always...either very young or very new to the field whose paradigm they
change....These are the men who, being little committed by prior practice to
the traditional rules of normal science, are particularly likely to see that those
rules no longer define a playable game and to conceive another set that can
replacethem."
-- Thomas S. Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962).
Although inspiring, the above quotation is by no means applicable to myself. However, it
keeps some resemblance with the circumstances that gave birth to this thesis. After
completing in 1990 my studies in Forest Engineering at the Polytechnic University of Madrid,
I began the doctoral courses hoping that I would getsome financial support to undertake a
Ph.D. Thesis. Since unfortunately this was not the case, I completed the courses and took
another path that got myself involved in development aid for several years. During all that
period I had with me this unsatisfied academic zeal. Vg. while in Mozambique, I applied for a
Ph D. program at CATIE in Costa Rica and even was accepted, but being a nationalof a
developed country, I was suggested to get my own funding...
The path to this thesis began in Málaga in Christmas 1997. I was in a dinner with some old
university fellows when I received a proposal from the Forest Map of Spain (MFE) team, with
whom I had collaborated in the past, to apply for an ESA/CDTI grant: I would finally have
data and time to write my Ph.D. Thesis and they would getin turn a method to update the
Map with satellite imagery. I applied for it and some months later, while working in
Guatemala, I was informed that I had been granted by the Spanish Ministry of Education to
stay for two years as a trainee in ESRIN, the European Space Agency (ESA) Earth
Observation data handling and exploitation centre, located in Frascati, Italy. I quitted my
overseas job andstarted my stay in ESRIN in December 1998.
VII
By the time I arrived there, I hardly had some bare notions about Remote Sensing, so it took
me several months to familiarize with this field. But as soon as I got my first Landsat image
and could overlay the MFE coverage on it, in observing that most polygons were
distinguishable from their neighbours, I realized a somehow naïve thought thatbecame the
motto of this research: ‘If the eye can see the difference, the problem is not in the data but in
the analysis’. Such trivial conclusion, derived from the poor results I obtained both from
supervised and unsupervised classifications, led me to embark on an exciting inquiry that for
the time being has ended up in the present document.
Unfortunately, my ESRIN traineeship came to an endbefore I could manage to put all the
pieces of knowledge I had gathered into a workable scheme. I retired to my hometown
Granada in order to carry on with the thesis, with the only sponsorship of my parents, who
generously provided me with food and shelter, and of some temporary jobs I got with the
help of friends and colleagues, which allowed me to retain my self-esteem. Albeit suchvoluntary seclusion has been hard to bear, it gave me a total intellectual freedom without
which I probably would have never written a thesis like this. However, I was never in
isolation during that period. I was connected to the world through a thin ADSL wire that
allowed me to keep in touch with colleagues and to search the internet for the most diverse
documents. Indeed, this thesis is a productof the internet era, for it gave me the wings I
needed in order to collect the nectar of scattered ideas. Having dissolved them into a loosely
coupled whole –this thesis, now it is time for others to transform it into a richer nourishment
for the progress of this field.
Granada, Spain, December 2002
VIII
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
During the long four years that took this thesis to complete, I...