Operational Tree Species Mapping in a Diverse Tropical Forest with Airborne Imaging Spectroscopy.

ABSTRACT: Remote identification and mapping of canopy tree species can contribute valuable information towards our understanding of ecosystem biodiversity and function over large spatial scales. However, the extreme challenges posed by highly diverse, closed-canopy tropical forests have prevented automated remote species mapping of non-flowering tree crowns in these ecosystems. We set out to identify individuals of three focal canopy tree species amongst a diverse background of tree and liana species on Barro Colorado Island, Panama, using airborne imaging spectroscopy data. First, we compared two leading single-class classification methods--binary support vector machine (SVM) and biased SVM--for their performance in identifying pixels of a single focal species. From this comparison we determined th

SUBMITTER: Baldeck CA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4496029 | biostudies-literature | 2015

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature