Abstract
Forests have potential economic value and play a significant role in maintaining ecological balance. Considering its outdated and incomplete forest statistics, the Kyrgyzstan Republic urgently needs a forest cover map for assessing its current forest resources and assisting national policies on improving rural livelihood and sustainability. This study adopted a hybrid fusion strategy to develop a forest cover map for the Kyrgyzstan Republic with improved accuracy. The fusion strategy uses the merits of the GlobeLand30 in 2010 and the USGS TreeCover2010, the benefits of auxiliary geographic information, and the advantages of the stacking learning method in classification. Additionally, we explored the influence of different forest definitions, based on the tree cover percentage value in the USGS TreeCover2010, on the accuracy of forest cover. Results suggested that the accuracy of our model can be improved significantly by including auxiliary geographic features and feeding the optimal size of training samples. Thereafter, using our model, forest cover maps were derived at different tree cover threshold values in the USGS TreeCover2010. Importantly, the forest cover map at the tree cover threshold value of 40% was determined as the most accurate one with the kappa value of 0.89, whose spatial extent constitutes about 2.4% of the entire territory. This estimated forest cover percentage suggests a low estimation of forest resources based on rigorous definition, which can be valuable for reviewing and amending the current national forest policies.
Highlights
Forest is an important natural resource that provides numerous benefits for many fields including economy, society, and environment
The Kyrgyzstan Republic is transiting from a planned economy to a market economy, which suggests the importance of understanding the economic value and potential of forest resources
Remote Sens. 2019, 11, 2325 to map the forest cover with improved accuracy using a hybrid fusion strategy, which can be used to other countries or other types of land covers; (2) we explored the influence of different forest definitions on the accuracy of forest cover, which could help to improve the accuracy of forest cover map for the Kyrgyzstan Republic
Summary
Forest is an important natural resource that provides numerous benefits for many fields including economy, society, and environment. The previous studies can improve the mapping accuracy, but it is still time-consuming and labor-intensive work to derive an accurate map nationally or globally, because a huge amount of training samples need to be manually selected and labeled considering the uneven distribution of forest across space It has been facilitated by the free availability of regional or global land cover products, which were developed using different datasets and different methodologies [16,17]. The main objective of this study is to develop a forest cover map with improved accuracy at the resolution of 30 m for the Kyrgyzstan Republic To achieve this objective, a hybrid fusion strategy is adopted, which includes land cover product fusion, geographical feature fusion, and classifier fusion. Remote Sens. 2019, 11, 2325 to map the forest cover with improved accuracy using a hybrid fusion strategy, which can be used to other countries or other types of land covers; (2) we explored the influence of different forest definitions on the accuracy of forest cover, which could help to improve the accuracy of forest cover map for the Kyrgyzstan Republic
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