Abstract
Leaf-cutting ants of the genus Atta are an important insect pest in forest plantations in many countries of South America. The objective of this work was to evaluate the potential for using Landsat-8 images, with medium spatial resolution and distributed free of charge, to detect leaf-cutting ant nests in Tectona grandis plantations in Brazil, using partial least squares discriminant analysis (PLS-DA). The regression model adjusted by PLS-DA selected three principal components with a cross-validation error of 0.275 to map and predict the presence of leaf-cutting ant nests in these plantations. The most important bands and vegetation indices were selected using the main variables in the projection (VIP) and predicted pixels with the presence or absence of leaf-cutting ant nests with an accuracy of 72.3% on an independent validation data set. The study indicates that Landsat-8 OLI images have the potential to detect and map leaf-cutting ant nests in T. grandis plantations.
Highlights
Tectona grandis L.f. (Lamiaceae), known as teak, is a deciduous tropical tree species, native to southern and southwestern Asia [1]
The permutational multivariate variance analysis (PERMANOVA) of the six Landsat-8 OLI sensor spectral bands and the eight vegetation indexes used in this study differed by the Mahalanobis distance for pixels with presence or absence of leaf-cutting ant nests
The partial least squares discriminant analysis (PLS-DA) model allowed for the separation of the spectra according to the presence or absence of leaf-cutting ant nests
Summary
Tectona grandis L.f. (Lamiaceae), known as teak, is a deciduous tropical tree species, native to southern and southwestern Asia [1]. The area planted with T. grandis in Mato Grosso state, Brazil, is over 74 thousand hectares [4]. Insect pests such as leaf-cutting ants limit the productivity of T. grandis plantations in monocultures [5,6]. Ants of the genus Atta are generalist herbivores with widespread distribution in the Americas, from the southern United States to northern Argentina [7] These ants are considered pests throughout the Neotropical region because they cut and transport plant fragments to cultivate their symbiotic fungus Leucoagaricus gongylophorus, from which their individuals feed [8,9]. A single nest of Atta laevigata (Smith, 1858) (Hymenoptera: Formicidae) can cut about 5 kg of plant material per day [10], and 89 nests of the genus Atta can collectively forage 825 kg of plant biomass per hectare [11]
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