Classification of Soil Moisture on Digitized False Color Aerial Photography for Artificial Scots Pine Regeneration Suitability Assessment

摘要

Artificial regeneration of Scots pine in Finnish Lapland has been problematic on moist sites previously classified as Norway spruce - downy birch dominated Hyloconium-myrtillus -type. High soil water content may have attributed to the majority of diebacks. High resolution (0.8 m) false color aerial photography were scanned, classified and filtered in an attempt to provide methodology to process this affordable, readily available data source for practical site-specific forestry planning of site suitability for regeneration by Scots pine. Overall highest user's (up to 87%) and producer's (up to 92%) accuracy measures for the suitable and unsuitable Scots pine regeneration areas were obtained using the maximum likelihood classifier. The isodata clustering and k-means classifier provided almost identical results of 77% overall accuracy. Based on the results of this preliminary study, we conclude that image processing of digital false color aerial photography can be a reasonably reliable site-specific method for pine regeneration suitability mapping on site-prepared clear-cuts.