Individual tree crown (ITC) delineation using watershed transformation algorithm for tropical lowland dipterocarp

Abstract

Tropical forest embraces a large stock of carbon and contributes to the enormous amount of above and below ground biomass in the global carbon cycle. Very high resolution imagery (VHR) satellite imagery can provide new opportunities to estimate the biomass and carbon stock of the forest area using crown projection area (CPA) as one of the predictor variable for accurately estimation the biophysical of the individual trees. Using multi-resolution segmentation resulted in inclusive accuracy of 82% in 1:1 correspondence and 78% segmentation accuracy with 21% error was observed from goodness of fit (D) value. Watershed transformation algorithm had been proven that suitable to be used to delineate the tree crown of the tropical lowland Dipterocarp forest area. In this study, data had been collected in tropical lowland Dipterocarp Royal Belum Forest Reserve, Perak State, Malaysia. The dominant species of this studies comes from families Dipterocarpaceae, Myrtaceae, Fabaceae and Lauraceae. A circular plot of 500 m2 area with a 12.62 m radius had been used during forest inventory data collection. This paper offer a methodology and accuracy assessment for measuring the crown delineation for tropical forest inventory data using very high resolution imagery(VHR) assembly to accomplish the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) monitoring, reporting and verification process.