Forest management practices and policies exert strong impacts on the spatio-temporal variations of forest disturbance in Hunan Province, China over the last three decades

•The spatio-temporal characteristics of forest disturbance in Hunan Province.•The overall accuracy of forest disturbance monitoring in Hunan Province was 86.39%.•Suitable spectral combination for disturbance detection was B5, B7, NBR, TCA and B3.•The disturbance events with patch area greater than 0.45 ha were increasing.