Abstract
Forests are an important natural resource that achieve ecological balance by regulating water regimes and promoting soil conservation. Based on forest inventories, the government is able to make decisions to sustainably conserve, improve, and manage forests. Fieldwork for forestry investigation requires intensive physical labor, which is costly and time-consuming, especially for surveys in remote mountainous regions. Remote sensing technology has been recently used for forest investigation on a large scale. An informative forest inventory must include forest attributes, including details of tree species; however, tree species mapping is not always applicable due to the similarity of surface reflectance and texture between tree species. Topographic variables such as elevation, slope, aspect, and curvature are crucial in allocating ecological niches to different species; therefore, this study suggests that integrating topographic information and optical satellite image classification can improve mapping accuracy for tree species. The main purpose of this study is to classify forest tree species in Erdenebulgan County, Huwsgul Province, Mongolia, by integrating Landsat satellite imagery with a Digital Elevation Model (DEM) using a Maximum Entropy algorithm. A forest tree species inventory from the Forest Division of the Mongolian Ministry of Nature and Environment was used as training data and as ground truth to perform the accuracy assessment. In this study, the classification was made using two different experimental approaches. First, classification was done using only Landsat surface reflectance data; and second, topographic variables were integrated with the Landsat surface reflectance data. The integration approach showed a higher overall accuracy and kappa coefficient, indicating that an accurate forest inventory can be achieved by integrating satellite imagery data and other topographic information to enhance the practice of forest management in remote regions.
Highlights
Forests are an important natural resource and play an important role in balancing ecological systems on the Earth [1]
This study aims to assist the preparation of forest inventory in extensive mountainous regions with complex structures and sustainable forest management efforts in northern Mongolia
Preliminary analysis of the spectral information of the tree species in the different bands revealed that the signature distributions of the four classes had significant overlaps in the visible spectrum bands
Summary
Forests are an important natural resource and play an important role in balancing ecological systems on the Earth [1]. Constructing relevant inventory information of forests, such as tree species composition, is an important approach to support environmental sustainable management [7]. Needed is knowledge about the distribution of tree species for use in atmospheric transport models, which require accurate emissions inventories [6] to precisely describe forest ecosystems [4]. Defined by Scott and Gove (2002) [9], forest inventories are “an accounting of trees and their related characteristics of interest over a well-defined land area”. The overall purpose of preparing a forest inventory is to compute the population of trees within forested land and to provide knowledgeable conclusions about the stand treatment required [9,10]
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