Paphos Forest successional artefacts: code and data for "Species replacement or classification artefact? Five mechanisms that manufacture successional signal in a four-decade Landsat series"

Code and data supporting the paper “Species replacement or classification artefact? Five mechanisms that manufacture successional signal in a four-decade Landsat series” (Ecological Informatics, under review). The study classifies nine Landsat epochs (1984–2024) of the Paphos Forest, Cyprus, against 873 field reference plots, and quantifies five coupled mechanisms that can manufacture a coherent but spurious account of forest change: leakage between reference observations, an uncorrected sensor changeover, landscape-wide radiometric drift, the classifier training design, and the dominance of terrain among the classification features. It introduces two diagnostics that need no data beyond those already used in the classification: a Monte Carlo null model that quantifies how many transitions a trajectory filter returns from classification noise alone, and a classifier-independent index of compositional position. The archive contains the complete analysis code (Google Earth Engine export scripts, the Python pipeline, the figure scripts and the original Earth Engine code of the conventional arm), a pinned software environment, the reference sample tables for all nine epochs, the 34-band feature stacks, the classified maps of both classifiers under both training designs, the retained transition layers, the daily and five-year precipitation records of eleven rain gauges, and every result table reported in the paper. All rasters and coordinates are in WGS 84 / UTM zone 36N (EPSG:32636) at 30 m resolution, with ISO 19115 metadata and a data dictionary describing every column. Code is released under the MIT licence and data under CC BY 4.0. See README.md for the folder layout and the order in which the scripts run.