Extracting information about saline soils from remote sensing data is useful, particularly given the environmental significance and changing nature of these areas in arid environments. One interesting case study to consider is the delta oasis of the Weigan and Kuqa rivers, China, which was studied using a Landsat Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) image collected in August 2001. In recent years, decision tree classifiers have been successfully used for land cover classification from remote sensing data. Principal component analysis (PCA) is a popular data reduction technique used to help build a decision tree; it reduces complexity and can help the classification precision of a decision tree to be improved. A decision tree approach was used to determine the key variables to be used for classification and ultimately extract salinized soil from other cover and soil types within the study area. According to the research, the third principal component (PC3) is an effective variable in the decision tree classification for salinized soil information extraction. The research demonstrated that the PC3 was the best band to identify areas of severely salinized soil; the blue spectral band from the ETM+ sensor (TM1) was the best band to identify salinized soil with the salt-tolerant vegetation of tamarisk (Tamarix chinensis Lour); and areas comprising mixed water bodies and vegetation can be identified using the spectral indices MNDWI (modified normalized difference water index) and NDVI (normalized difference vegetation index). Based upon this analysis, a decision tree classifier was applied to classify landcover types with different levels of soil saline. The results were checked using a statistical accuracy assessment. The overall accuracy of the classification was 94.80%, which suggested that the decision tree model is a simple and effective method with relatively high precision.
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