How to Recognize Different Types of Trees from Quite a Long Way Away: Combining UAV and Spaceborne Imagery for Stand-Level Tree Species Identification

In order to understand how a forest may respond to environmental changes or develop over time, it is necessary to examine broad, landscape level factors. With the arrival of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), the combination of both spaceborne data with high resolution UAV data can provide foresters and biologists with powerful tools to classify canopies to the species level, which we illustrate here. We combine imagery from the Operational Land Imager (OLI) of the Landsat 8 satellite with aerial imagery from a Phantom 4 UAV to map canopy composition of three tree species. We manually delineated dense stands of each tree species in the UAV imagery to extract training samples from an OLI true colour composite image to perform a fuzzy membership analysis and calculate the maximum likelihood that an individual pixel represented a particular species. We verified the accuracy of our analysis finding an overall accuracy of 0.796 and a kappa statistic of 0.728. We consider these results to be a strong demonstration of the value of using UAV and satellite imagery in tandem to investigate forest-wide effects at an individual tree level.The accepted manuscript in pdf format is listed with the files at the bottom of this page. The presentation of the authors' names and (or) special characters in the title of the manuscript may differ slightly between what is listed on this page and what is listed in the pdf file of the accepted manuscript; that in the pdf file of the accepted manuscript is what was submitted by the author