Vegetation Inventory of a Temperate Biosphere Reserve in China by Image Fusion of Landsat TM and SPOT HRV

Abstract

Vegetation cover types on Changbai Mountain, a natural biosphere reserve (2,000 km2) in northeast China, were derived by using multisensor satellite imagery fused with Landsat TM and SPOT HRV-XS. DEM data were used for improving classification accuracy. Cover types were classified into 20 groups. Bands 4 and 5 of Landsat TM image acquired on July 18, 1997, and band 1 of SPOT HRV-XS image acquired on Oct. 19, 1992, were fused to a false color image, and maximum likelihood supervised classification was performed. Data fusion showed high accuracy of identification, compared to individual images. The overall accuracy of classification of individual images by SPOT HRV-XS reached 56%, and TM 66%, while the fused data set provided accuracy of about 78%, which was raised to 81% after recoding by using DEM. There were five vegetation zones on the mountain, from the base to the peak: hardwood forest zone, mixed forest zone, conifer forest zone, birch forest zone, and tundra zone. Spruce-fir dominated conifer forest was the most prevalent (nearly 50%) vegetation type, followed by Korean pine and mixed forest (17%) and larch forest (5%). HRV image taken in leaf-off season is useful for discriminating forest from non-forest, and evergreen forest from hardwood forest, while the summer image (TM) provides detailed information on the difference in similar vegetation types, like hardwood forest with different compositions.