Abstract
Individual tree crown (ITC) delineation in temperate forests is challenging owing to the presence of broadleaved species with overlapping crowns. Mixed coniferous/deciduous forests with characteristics that differ with the type of tree thus require a flexible method of delineation. The ITC delineation method based on the multi-criteria graph (MCG-Tree) addresses this problem in temperate monospecific or mixed forests by combining geometric and spectral information. The method was used to segment trees in three temperate forest sites with different characteristics (tree types, species distribution, planted or natural forest). Compared with a state-of-the-art watershed segmentation approach, our method increased delineation performance by up to 25%. Our results showed that the main geometric criterion to improve delineation quality is related to the crown radius (performance improvement around 8%). Coniferous/deciduous classification automatically adapts the MCG-Tree criteria to the type of tree. Promising results are then obtained to improve delineation performance for mixed forests.
Highlights
The temperate forest biome accounts for about 9% of emerged land
The adaptation of MCG-Tree parameters according to the forest type slightly improves the delineation performance with an increase of around 2% compared to previous results (Figure 10, performance around 0.81)
Whatever the forest site, the MCGTree method improves the delineation performance compared to the classical watershed method
Summary
The temperate forest biome accounts for about 9% of emerged land. It is the second biggest forest biome after boreal forest and is currently increasing due to afforestation [1].These forests represent an important resource for forestry and contribute greatly to carbon stocks [2,3]. The temperate forest biome accounts for about 9% of emerged land It is the second biggest forest biome after boreal forest and is currently increasing due to afforestation [1]. In southwestern France, temperate forests cover more than 30% of the land with a majority of broadleaves species (including oak and beech) and some coniferous species (including pine, fir and spruce) [4]. Monitoring these forests is crucial to evaluate tree resources and to manage the resources for biodiversity preservation. One way to overcome this limitation is remote sensing, which makes it possible to characterize forest ecosystems over larger areas [8,9]
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