The package ShapeSelectForest is specially designed for Landsat time series of forest dynamics, and we develop it in the North American Dynamics Project with Forest Inventory & Analysis (FIA) scientists.

By constrained quadratic B-splines, this package delivers an optimal shape-restricted trajectory to a time series of Landsat imagery for the purpose of modeling annual forest disturbance dynamics to behave in an ecologically sensible manner assuming one of seven possible "shapes", namely, flat, decreasing, one-jump (decreasing, jump up, decreasing), inverted vee (increasing then decreasing), vee (decreasing then increasing), linear increasing, and double-jump (decreasing, jump up, decreasing, jump up, decreasing).


The main routine selects the best shape according to the minimum Bayes information criterion (BIC) or the cone information criterion (CIC), which is defined as the log of the estimated predictive squared error. (See references in the official manual for more details about CIC.)