Affiliation:
1. College of Forestry, Southwest Forestry University, Kunming 650224, China
2. Institute of Forest Resource Information Techniques, Chinese Academy of Forestry, Beijing 100091, China
3. Biological and Environmental Sciences, The University of Stirling, Stirling FK9 4LA, UK
4. Aerospace Xinde Zhitu (Beijing) Technology Co., Ltd., Beijing 100000, China
Abstract
An accurate estimation of canopy cover can provide an important basis for forest ecological management by understanding the forest status and change patterns. The aim of this paper is to investigate the four methods of the random forest (RF), support vector regression (SVR), k-nearest neighbor (KNN), and k-nearest neighbor with fast iterative features selection (KNN-FIFS) for modeling forest canopy cover, and to evaluate three mainstream optical data sources—Landsat8 OLI, Sentinel-2A, Gaofen-1 (GF-1)—and three types of data combined comparatively by selecting the optimal modeling method. The paper uses the Daxinganling Ecological Station of Genhe City, Inner Mongolia, as the research area, and is based on three types of multispectral remote sensing data, extracting spectral characteristics, textural characteristics, terrain characteristics; the Kauth–Thomas transform (K-T transform); and color transformation characteristics (HIS). The optimal combination of features was selected using three feature screening methods, namely stepwise regression, RF, and KNN-FIFS, and the four methods: RF, SVR KNN, and KNN-FIFS, were combined to carry out the evaluation analysis regarding the accuracy of forest canopy cover modeling: (1) In this study, a variety of remote sensing features were introduced, and the feature variables were selected by different parameter preference methods and then employed in modeling. Based on the four modeling inversion methods, the KNN-FIFS model achieves the best accuracy: the Landsat8 OLI with R2 = 0.60, RMSE = 0.11, and RMSEr = 14.64% in the KNN-FIFS model; the Sentinel-2A with R2 = 0.80, RMSE = 0.08, and RMSEr = 11.63% in the KNN-FIFS model; the GF-1 with R2 = 0.55, RMSE = 0.12, and RMSEr = 15.04% in the KNN-FIFS model; and the federated data with R2 = 0.82, RMSE = 0.08, and RMSEr = 10.40% in the KNN-FIFS model; (2) the three multispectral datasets have the ability to estimate forest canopy cover, and the modeling accuracy superior under the combination of multi-source data features; (3) under different optical data, KNN- FIFS achieves the best accuracy in the established nonparametric model, and its feature optimization method is better than that of the random forest optimization method. For the same model, the estimation result of the joint data is better than the single optical data; thus, the KNN-FIFS model, with specific parameters, can significantly improve the inversion accuracy and efficiency of forest canopy cover evaluation from different data sources.
Funder
National Natural Science Foundation of China
High Resolution Earth Observation System Major Project “Application Sub-System for High Resolution Forest Resources Survey”
High Resolution Earth Observation System Major Special Project “Preparation of Standards and Specifications for Authenticity Testing of High Resolution Common Products”
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