Abstract
Forest health is an important variable that we need to monitor for forest management decision making. However, forest health is difficult to assess and monitor based merely on forest field surveys. In the present study, we first derived a comprehensive forest health indicator using 15 forest stand attributes extracted from forest inventory plots. Second, Pearson’s correlation analysis was performed to investigate the relationship between the forest health indicator and the spectral and textural measures extracted from SPOT-5 images. Third, all-subsets regression was performed to build the predictive model by including the statistically significant image-derived measures as independent variables. Finally, the developed model was evaluated using the coefficient of determination (R2) and the root mean square error (RMSE). Additionally, the produced model was further validated for its performance using the leave-one-out cross-validation approach. The results indicated that our produced model could provide reliable, fast and economic means to assess and monitor forest health. A thematic map of forest health was finally produced to support forest health management.
Highlights
Forests are the largest terrestrial ecosystems on the earth and play a significant role in providing ecological, economic and social benefits [1,2]
The cumulative variance explained by the first five components accounted for 83.9% of the total variance, which indicated that these five factors represented most of the original information (Table 3)
quadratic mean diameter (QMD), basal area (BA), number of trees (NT) and stand volume (SV) accounted for the tree growth efficiency; Shannon–Wiener index (SHI), Simpson index (SII), Pielou’s evenness index (PI), Gini coefficient (GC), standard deviation of the DBHs (SDDBH), uniform angle index (UAI), tree species intermingling index (TSII), DBH dominance index (DBHDI) and diameter differentiation index (DDI) were representative of forest structural diversity; and humus depth (HD) represented the soil status or site productivity
Summary
Forests are the largest terrestrial ecosystems on the earth and play a significant role in providing ecological, economic and social benefits [1,2]. Forests of rich species composition and complex structure (good condition) are documented to be capable of providing much more ecological services as well as timber production compared with forests that have a simple structure (poor condition) [4,5,6]. This might be the reason why, currently, irregular forest management towards complex structure and high diversity is being widely adopted and prevails [7,8,9]. The lack of a universal definition hindered the assessment of forest health as well as the monitoring of its dynamics
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