Remote sensing methods for estimating tree species of forests in the Volyn region, Ukraine

Abstract

Forest classification is needed to solve a wide range of environmental issues related to of forest classes and succession processes, the extent of afforestation and deforestation and global environmental change. These applications require a very accurate mapping and monitoring of forest types. This article investigates the combination of modern open geographic information systems and remote sensing data in forest management tasks for a specific part of the Ukrainian state area. Based on the existing afforestation plans, the results of the unsupervised classification of Sentinel-2 images and the selection of forest species fragments with closed crowns as training data for supervised classification, classifiers of forest species of the study object were developed with and without taking into account age groups. A supervised classification of research objects is realized and the accuracy of the obtained results is evaluated. It is established that the accuracy of determining forest species on the basis of the proposed method is 90.3 and 91.4%, taking into account age groups and without taking them into account, respectively. Thus, it is found that the modeling of the age groups does not improve the classification result for the test area.