Species-Level Differences in Hyperspectral Metrics among Tropical Rainforest Trees as Determined by a Tree-Based Classifier

M. Clark,D. Roberts

Published 2012 in Remote Sensing

ABSTRACT

Abstract: This study explores a method to classify seven tropical rainforest tree species from full-range (400–2,500 nm) hyperspectral data acquired at tissue (leaf and bark), pixel and crown scales using laboratory and airborne sensors. Metrics that respond to vegetation chemistry and structure were derived using narrowband indices, derivative- and absorption-based techniques, and spectral mixture analysis. We then used the Random Forests tree-based classifier to discriminate species with minimally-correlated, importance-ranked metrics. At all scales, best overall accuracies were achieved with metrics derived from all four techniques and that targeted chemical and structural properties across the visible to shortwave infrared spectrum (400–2500 nm). For tissue spectra, overall accuracies were 86.8% for leaves, 74.2% for bark, and 84.9% for leaves plus bark. Variation in tissue metrics was best explained by an axis of red absorption related to photosynthetic leaves and an axis distinguishing bark water and other chemical absorption features. Overall accuracies for individual tree crowns were 71.5% for pixel spectra, 70.6% crown-mean spectra, and 87.4% for a pixel-majority technique. At pixel and crown scales, tree structure and phenology at the time of image acquisition were important factors that determined species spectral separability.

PUBLICATION RECORD

  • Publication year

    2012

  • Venue

    Remote Sensing

  • Publication date

    2012-06-18

  • Fields of study

    Geology, Computer Science, Environmental Science

  • Identifiers
  • External record

    Open on Semantic Scholar

  • Source metadata

    Semantic Scholar

CITATION MAP

EXTRACTION MAP

CLAIMS

  • No claims are published for this paper.

CONCEPTS

  • No concepts are published for this paper.

REFERENCES

Showing 1-85 of 85 references · Page 1 of 1

CITED BY

Showing 1-100 of 168 citing papers · Page 1 of 2