FOREST LAND MANAGEMENT BY SATELLITE:LANDSAT-DERIVED INFORMATION AS INPUT TO A FOREST INVENTORY SYSTEM

摘要

The Weyerhaeuser Company (North Carolina Region) participated in a cooperative project with the Information Transfer Laboratory (Intralab) at National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA's) Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC). Intralab's primary goal is to provide sufficient information on a specific application of remote sensing technology for a user to make an informed decision to incorporate remote sensing data into routine operations. This project was undertaken to investigate the applicability of information de¬rived from Landsat multispectral scanner (MSS) digital data as supplemental input to a forest inventory system.nWinter and summer Landsat scenes (4 channel) of the North Carolina Coastal Region were analyzed individually, and then registered and merged (8 channel) to take advantage of temporal changes in forest canopy. Best results were obtained through analysis of the summer and 8 channel merged data. Three separable pine categories were successfully ex¬tracted, assessing the extent of crown closure and its influence on the amount of ground vegetation that would be sensed by an airborne scanner.