An innovative lightweight 1D-CNN model for efficient monitoring of large-scale forest composition: a case study of Heilongjiang Province, China

Large-scale forest composition mapping and change monitoring are essential for regional and national forest resource management, monitoring, and carbon stock assessment. However, the existing large-scale mapping methods are not effective enough in terms of efficiency and accuracy. To address this limitation, this study proposes a lightweight one-dimensional convolutional neural network (LW-CNN) model for forest composition mapping. The LW-CNN model is developed using Landsat imagery covering 470,700 km2 obtained from Google Earth Engine (GEE) collected during two periods (2007 and 2018). The proposed LW-CNN is compared with a visual geometry group with 16 convolutional layers (VGG16), a residual network with 34 convolutional layers (Resnet34), and a residual network with 50 convolutional layers (Resnet50) in terms of model accuracy and efficiency. The factors influencing forest composition change are analyzed using the structural equation model (SEM). The results show that the proposed LW-CNN model can outperform the other three models in terms of model accuracy, achieving a mean overall accuracy (OA) of: 0.75 and efficiency of 7–22-fold. The changed forest composition from 2007 to 2018 accounts for 29.6% of the total forest area. The SEM results show that the climate factors have the most significant effect on the forest composition change. This study presents an innovative model for large-scale forest composition mapping, which is proven to be both efficient and accurate. This study also provides insights into the factors that affect the forest composition change, which could be valuable for forest resource management, monitoring, and carbon stock assessment.