Abstract
Uneven-aged forest management has received increasing attention in the past few years. Compared with even-aged plantations, the complex structure of uneven-aged forests complicates the formulation of management strategies. Forest structural diversity is expected to provide considerable significant information for uneven-aged forest management planning. In the present study, we investigated the potential of using SPOT-5 satellite images for extracting forest structural diversity. Forest stand variables were calculated from the field plots, whereas spectral and textural measures were derived from the corresponding satellite images. We firstly employed Pearson’s correlation analysis to examine the relationship between the forest stand variables and the image-derived measures. Secondly, we performed all possible subsets multiple linear regression to produce models by including the image-derived measures, which showed significant correlations with the forest stand variables, used as independent variables. The produced models were evaluated with the adjusted coefficient of determination ( R a d j 2 ) and the root mean square error (RMSE). Furthermore, a ten-fold cross-validation approach was used to validate the best-fitting models ( R a d j 2 > 0.5). The results indicated that basal area, stand volume, the Shannon index, Simpson index, Pielou index, standard deviation of DBHs, diameter differentiation index and species intermingling index could be reliably predicted using the spectral or textural measures extracted from SPOT-5 satellite images.
Highlights
Forests are the largest territorial ecosystems and play a significant role in providing us with economic benefits as well as ecological services [1,2]
In terms of species diversity, Shannon–Wiener index (SHI), for example, ranged from 0 to 1.801, which indicates that the sampling plots contained both single-tree species and mixed-tree species stands, representing a wide range of species diversity
Our results indicated that amongst the 11 candidate forest stand variables, only species diversity represented by SHI, Pielou index (PI) and Simpson’s index (SII) could be reliably estimated using only textural measures
Summary
Forests are the largest territorial ecosystems and play a significant role in providing us with economic benefits as well as ecological services [1,2]. Ecological services provided by forests such as soil and water conservation, combating climate change, biodiversity conservation as well as the recreational values of forest landscapes have been highlighted due to the worsening environmental problems [2,3,4] In this context, multiple-purpose forest management has been proposed as a silvicultural alternative. For the management of even-aged, mono-specific stands, the conventional forest stand variables such as number of trees (NT), stand volume per unit area (SV), basal area (BA), and quadratic mean diameter (QMD) are considered to be sufficient to prescribe management strategies because such types of forests have a simple structure and are easy to manage. Corona [12] documented that forest inventory and mapping are broadening their scope towards multipurpose resources surveys in the context of global change, utilities from ecosystem management and recent change in forest management perspective
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