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These close-ups show another core zone area of the reserve called Pelon. Forest disturbance is most visible in the 2000 image. Later Landsat images reveal some red filling in in this area. In the Landsat imagery, red indicates any actively growing vegetation, so it may not be the tall trees of oyamel forest recovering yet. The Global Forest Change data do reveal some blue pixels in the Pelon site, so there is potentially some recent recovery occurring.

The northern side of this site had been stripped of several historical colony sites by the time of the 2000 Landsat image. The Global Forest Change data don’t show some of this area as forest loss because that study uses Landsat data from 2000 to 2013, so the areas that are black were already non-forest by 2000.

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Mar. 17, 1993, Landsat 5 (path/row 27/46) — Pelon site, Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve, Mexico
Apr. 21, 2000, Landsat 5 (path/row 27/46) — Pelon site, Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve, Mexico
Mar. 19, 2011, Landsat 5 (path/row 27/46) — Pelon site, Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve, Mexico
Mar. 11, 2014, Landsat 8 (path/row 27/46) — Pelon site, Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve, Mexico
Apr. 1, 2016, Landsat 8 (path/row 27/46) — Pelon site, Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve, Mexico
Global Forest Change map (Hansen and others, 2013).

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