Provision of land use and forest density maps in semi-arid areas of Iran using Sentinel-2 satellite images and vegetation indices

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Zagros forests of Iran have several environmental, ecological, and socioeconomic values which provide the unique habitats for many endemic species. However, these ecosystems have severely been destroyed by many anthropogenic and natural factors in recent years. Knowledge of area, distribution, and density of these forests and current natural and human-made land uses inside these ecosystems is necessary for protective management of Zagros forests. This research was performed to obtain the land use and forest density maps in Zagros vegetative area of Fars province in southwestern Iran using Sentinel-2A, vegetation indices, Google Earth, and field data. First the boundary of Zagros forests in Fars province was digitized on Google Earth images. Then, Sentinel-2A satellite images covering the forest region in Fars province were obtained from Copernicus website. A pilot area (16000 ha) in the province was considered to investigate the precision of classification methods. Then, Sentinel-2A satellite image of pilot region was classified by some supervised classification methods (ML: maximum likelihood, MD: minimum distance, MaD: mahalanobis distance, SAM: spectral angle mapper, NN: neural network, SVM: support vector machine, and RF: random forest). In addition, the efficiency of different vegetation indices (NDVI, TNDVI, SAVI, and RVI) was evaluated for classifying the forest density in the pilot region. Furthermore, pilot area was considered to test the precision of Google Earth satellite images in this study. For this purpose, 270 field samples were taken as square plots in nine land uses. Selection of the plots inside each land use was randomly. After initial analysis, all satellite images covering the forest area in Fars province were classified by the most accurate algorithm (SVM) to obtain the land use map. On the other hand, the most accurate vegetation index (SAVI) was used to classify the forest density in the study area. Validation of final maps was performed using several random plots on Google Earth images. The initial results of this research indicated that Google Earth images have an overall accuracy (OA) of 96 % compared to ground truth in Fars province. Results of land use map showed that Zagros forest has covered an area of 794651.79 ha in Fars province. The findings of this research demonstrated that SVM algorithm (OA: 92.94 %, and k: 0.85) has efficiently classified the land uses in Fars province. In addition, SAVI (r2 = 0.719, p < 0.001) has highly been correlated to the forest density in Zagros vegetative area of Fars province. Therefore, land use mapping using SVM algorithm and Sentinel-2A images, and forest density mapping using SAVI is highly recommended in Zagros forests of Fars province in time series which is essential for protective management of these forests in spatio-temporal scale.