Full polarimetric PALSAR-based land cover monitoring in Cambodia for implementation of REDD policies

Abstract

Forest cover monitoring plays an important role in the implementation of climate change mitigation policies such as Kyoto protocol and Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD). In this study, we have monitored land cover using the PALSAR (Phased Array type L-band Synthetic Aperture Radar) full polarimetric data based on incoherent target decomposition. Supervised classification technique has been applied on Cloude–Pottier decomposition, Freeman–Durden three component, and Yamaguchi four component decomposition for accurate mapping of different types of land cover classes. Based on confusion matrix derived from the predicted and defined pixels, the evergreen and sparsely deciduous forests have shown high producer's accuracy by Freeman–Durden three component and Yamaguchi four component classifications. The overall accuracy of Maximum Likelihood Classification by Yamaguchi four component is 94.1% with 0.93 kappa coefficient as compared to the 90.3% with 0.88 kappa coefficient by Freeman–Durden three component and 89.7% with 0.88 kappa coefficient by Cloude–Pottier decomposition. High accuracy of classification in a forested area using full polarimetric PALSAR data may have been because of high penetration of L-band SAR. The content of this study could be useful for the forest cover mapping during cloudy days needed for proper implementation of REDD policies in Cambodia.