Forest characterization with high resolution satellite data for a regional inventory

QuickBird satellite data was used to examine stem density, basal area, and crown density, as potential forest strata to aid in volume estimations for a regional inventory program. The classes used for analysis were pine pole and sawtimber, and hardwood pole and sawtimber. Total height, height to live crown, diameter at breast height (dbh), and crown class were measured on 129 field plots used in image classification and accuracy assessments. Supervised classification produced overall accuracy of 85% with a Kappa of 0.8065. The classification was used for the extraction of mean band data and percent of forested pixels. Satellite derived variables were used with field measurements such as average basal area and stem density for regression analysis to predict forest characteristics such as stem density and crown closure that are indicators of volume variability. The R2 values ranged from 0.0005 to 0.2815 for hardwoods and 0.0001 to 0.6174 for pines