Information-Theoretical Comparison between Actual and Potential Natural Vegetation

摘要

An information theory measure of shared information,average mutual information (AMI),was applied to compare the similarity between potential natural vegetation (PNV) and actual vegetation (AV),where terrain factors were incorporated for mapping PNV,and TM imagery and MNDVI for AV,respectively. Object-oriented approaches were used to produce categorical maps for distributions of PNV and AV. In order to find the maximum relation between PNV and AV,AMI and contingency tables were used.Results show that AMI is low between PNV and AV,and varies with different scales. Therefore,simple combination of PNV and AV should be implemented with care.