Forest canopy stratification based on fused, imbalanced and collinear LiDAR and Sentinel-2 metrics

Abstract

Knowledge about the forest canopy stratification is of essential importance for forest management and planning. Collecting structural information (e.g. natural regeneration) still depends on cost and labour intensive forest inventories with a coarse spatio-temporal resolution. Remote sensing partly overcomes these limitations and particularly active sensors of type light detection and ranging (LiDAR) have proven their great potential of separating forest strata. The applicability of LiDAR metrics for the differentiation of the spruce dominated forest strata in Central Germany has not been tested yet. Additionally, studying the potential of Sentinel-2 metrics for the classification of forest strata is lacking too.In this study, we investigated the capabilities of six different classification approaches for the differentiation of five forest strata that are typical for the study region. Reference data were derived from forest inventory measurements surveyed on a dense 200 × 200 m grid. The six classification approaches were trained with fused and un-fused LiDAR and Sentinel-2 inferred metrics. The classification results were compared using the overall mean accuracy, sensitivity and specificity via receivers operating characteristics of multi-class problems. We were interested in the classification abilities of Sentinel-2 metrics due to the obvious advantages of Sentinel-2 based metrics (free of charge, high spatio-temporal coverage). We assumed that the canopy structure determines the reflection on stand level and thus might facilitate the classification of different canopy strata. Beforehand, it was important to examine the influence of distinctly imbalanced and collinear reference data on the classification results.We found that the Random Forest classifier most accurately separated the five forest strata with a mean overall accuracy of 83.3% (Kappa = 76.2%). These values were achieved from balanced training data and the classification capability was confirmed by classification results from an independent test data set. Fused predictors of active (LiDAR) and passive (Sentinel-2) remote sensing revealed no substantial improvement in the classification accuracy due to the dominant role of LiDAR metrics. Herein, we identified that especially the height variability, top height, portion of LiDAR-returns between 2 m and 10 m and the standard deviation of the return number between the 25th and 50th height percentile, predominately contributed to the classification accuracy. Classification results purely based on Sentinel-2 metrics revealed a rather small overall mean accuracy of 54.7%. The metrics (e.g. median, variance, entropy) were derived from Sentinel-2 indices, covering the visible and near to short infrared spectrum. Variable importance computations unraveled a detectable but minor contribution of MSI, TCG, NDVI to the classification result. Finally, our data driven observations illustrated serious drawbacks associated to data imbalance, collinearity and autocorrelation and presented practical guidance to cope with these issues.