Plantation Mapping in Southeast Asia.

Xiaowei Jia,Paul C. West,Kimberly Carlson,James S. Gerber,Ankush Khandelwal,Vipin Kumar

doi:10.3389/fdata.2019.00046

Abstract

Plantation mapping is important for understanding deforestation and climate change. While most existing plantation products are created manually, in this paper we study an ensemble learning based framework for automatically mapping plantations in southern Kalimantan on a yearly scale using remote sensing data. We study the effectiveness of several components in this framework, including class aggregation, data sampling, learning model selection and post-processing, by comparing with multiple baselines. In addition, we analyze the quality of our plantation mapping product by visual examination of high resolution images. We also compare our method to existing manually labeled plantation datasets and show that our method can achieve a better balance of precision (i.e., user's accuracy) and recall (i.e., producer's accuracy).

Highlights

In recent years, biofuels synthesized from crops have provided an opportunity to reduce the dependence on fossil fuels
Through visual inspection of high resolution imagery and manually labeled set of points, we show that the proposed framework can overcome the imperfectness of the available products and has the potential to produce high-quality large-scale plantation maps with little manual effort
With these examples in R1 and R2, we demonstrate that our proposed method can detect the real plantation locations that are missing from the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) dataset while avoiding the locations that are mistakenly detected by Tree Plantation dataset

Summary

Introduction

Biofuels synthesized from crops have provided an opportunity to reduce the dependence on fossil fuels. Biofuels may help strengthen the energy security in countries that do not have direct availability of fossil fuel deposits while reducing of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions (Sorda et al, 2010). The production of biofuel crops can have a negative impact on the environment, such as deforestation (Fargione et al, 2008). Biofuels put more stress on water and land resources that could otherwise be used for the production of food (Cai et al, 2010). The competing needs for land and water resources by food and biofuel production has been a very important issue of the food-water-energy debate (Tilman et al, 2009; Lambin and Meyfroidt, 2011)

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion