Land cover mapping in Yok Don National Park, Central Highlands of Viet Nam using Landsat 8 OLI images

Abstract

Over the past four decades, remote sensing has more useful and effective contributions in the classification, map- ping of land cover, forest cover map. Out of these achievements, there are still limitations in the application, especial- ly in the tropical region, because of the diversity and abundance of land cover objects, of course including tropical forests, where are the vegetation status varies due to the seasons of the year. In this study, we selected Landsat 8 sat- ellite imagery from both dry and rainy seasons for the purpose of building detailed land cover maps of Yok Don Na- tional Park, Central Highlands of Vietnam where has two major forest types (a) deciduous broadleaf forest and (b) evergreen broadleaf forest. The land cover mapping was based on supervised classification approach. The results of forest cover area showed that total Evergreen broad-leaved forests (rich, medium and poor) area are 25,578 ha (22.14%) and total Dry open dipterocarps forests (rich, medium and poor) area are 88,435 ha (76.54%), and another object is 1,531.86 ha (1.33%). The detailed land cover map with the 15 m resolution provided and is useful for forest management in the study area. The results of the assessment accuracy of the land cover mapping showed that 88.37% of overall accuracy, 89.35% of producer accuracy, and 90.60% of user’s accuracy