All countries of western Europe use these 
damage classes according to the table 
(1) in their forest damage inventory. 
The test site located at St. Blasien in 
the (Black Forest) FRG consists the 
following tree speceis: spruce = 84%, fir 
= 3% Beech and Maple = 8% and others =5% 
with a mix of different age classes. Most 
of the test site is located at an alti 
tude between 800 and 1400m above mean sea 
level. The PH value in the forest soil at 
this site as determined 25 years ago was 
4.4 and now is dropped to 2.2-3.0 . The 
annual precipitation at this altitude is 
approximately 1500 mm and mean annual 
temperature is 5,5-5,9 Celsius . (This 
information comes from the forest service 
at St.Blasien/ Schluchsee in the Black 
Forest). 
The forest decline situation at the Erz 
gebirge site differs from the test site 
at St. Blasien in the areal extent and 
damage degree. The Erzgebirge region is 
more than 110 km long and 20-25 km broad 
and contains a very large forest area 
characterised by very high forest damage, 
totaly dead forest area and clear cut 
forest area. This large area means, in 
the case of an observer on the ground the 
distance between one horizon to the 
other. The air pollution in the Erzge 
birge region is very high. Czeckoslovakia 
(CSFR), Poland and East Germany produce 
large amounts of SO 2 mainly through heavy 
industry and lignite power plants. There 
are many lignite power plants in East 
Germany and in Czeckoslovakia in opera 
tion since the Second World War and some 
of them existed even earlier. East 
Germany is the world’s largest lignite 
consumer, using over 300 million metric 
tons per year. Most of the lignite is 
used by thermal power stations supplying 
over 83 % of the country' electricity 
needs. The high sulphur content of this 
fuel is the reason why the GDP has the 
highest emissions of sulphur dioxide per 
inhabitant in Europe. Poland and CSFR 
also use lignite and produce nearly as 
GDR (Acid Magazine No.8 September 1989). 
There is no detailed information about 
the tree species and their distribution 
in the Erzgebirge region, due to the very 
large area and lack of published data 
from such GDR and CSSR. The Forest Ser 
vice in CSFR has provided roughly in 
formation, suggesting that the study site 
consists of the following species: Norway 
spruce, white fir, European larch, pine, 
and douglas fir totallings (83%) of the 
forested areas. The dominant species is 
spruce but in addition Beech/Oak (7%) and 
other species (5%). The test site is lo 
cated at altitude between 360 m and 1244 
m above mean sea level. Other information 
such as the annual volume of preci 
pitation, temperature and pH value in the 
soil, are not available at present. 
Due to the unavailable information from 
this test site (Erzgebirge) such as in 
frared color aerial photography or detail 
ground information, the author construc 
ted special classes according to his ex- 
perince in the Black Forest regarding the 
forest situation and the size of the 
study area. 
The determined classes are: 
a- healthy and slightly damaged conife 
rous stands 
b- damage and severely damaged coniferous 
stands 
c- dying and dead coniferous stands 
d- clear cut area 
e- deciduous stands 
The current research focus is to develop 
and establish a methodology based on the 
evaluation of Landsat imagery as one mean 
of forest damage assessment and not to 
replace conventional inventory methods 
such as ground checking and the inter 
pretation of infrared aerial photographs. 
Use of these two conventional methods for 
forest damage assessment of forest 
decline for large areas such as the Erz 
gebirge is not a practicable method at 
present for rapid forest damage inven 
tory. The current research makes use of 
the Landsat imagery processed via a com 
puter-aided evaluation for forest damage 
assessment, mapping, and change de 
tection . 
2 Material and Methods. 
The test site located at St. Blasien in 
the Black Forest, is supported by much 
essential informations, because the test 
site has been used for many years as a 
test site for a project dealing with use 
of airborne multispectral scanner data 
(TM-Simulation=TMS) taken from different 
altitudes for the investigation of the 
spectral reflectance properties and their 
use for the classification of forest da 
mages conditions. 
In addition to the Airborne multispectral 
data, aerial IR-Color photography, at the 
scale 1:5000, has been taken in support 
of the multispectral data acquisitions. 
Another kind of information is the ground 
truth of different stands in the test 
site . 
The results that were acquired through 
the interpretation of aerial CIR-photo- 
graphs and analysis of the acquired 
ground truth data have been used for 
selecting of training areas representing 
different levels of damages or the veri 
fication of the results that were achived 
by the computer-aided classification 
approach to analyzing TM/TMS data. 
Two Landsat-TM scenes were ordered for 
investigation and evaluation. The dates 
of the scenes are September 12. 1985 and 
June 27, 1986 with coordinate 195/27. 
Both scenes have good data quality and 
are without cloud cover. 
The Erzgebirge site has no additional in 
formation such as ground truth data or TR 
color aerial photographs. The only 
available data for this site are the 
Landsat in,ages from 1972-1987. 
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