Classifying a Highly Polymorphic Tree Species across Landscapes Using Airborne Imaging Spectroscopy

Megan M. Seeley, Nicholas R. Vaughn, Brennon L. Shanks, Roberta E. Martin, Marcel König, Gregory P. Asner

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

2 Scopus citations

Abstract

Vegetation classifications on large geographic scales are necessary to inform conservation decisions and monitor keystone, invasive, and endangered species. These classifications are often effectively achieved by applying models to imaging spectroscopy, a type of remote sensing data, but such undertakings are often limited in spatial extent. Here we provide accurate, high-resolution spatial data on the keystone species Metrosideros polymorpha, a highly polymorphic tree species distributed across bioclimatic zones and environmental gradients on Hawai’i Island using airborne imaging spectroscopy and LiDAR. We compare two tree species classification techniques, the support vector machine (SVM) and spectral mixture analysis (SMA), to assess their ability to map M. polymorpha over 28,000 square kilometers where differences in topography, background vegetation, sun angle relative to the aircraft, and day of data collection, among others, challenge accurate classification. To capture spatial variability in model performance, we applied Gaussian process classification (GPC) to estimate the spatial probability density of M. polymorpha occurrence using only training sample locations. We found that while SVM and SMA models exhibit similar raw score accuracy over the test set (96.0% and 93.4%, respectively), SVM better reproduces the spatial distribution of M. polymorpha than SMA. We developed a final 2 m × 2 m M. polymorpha presence dataset and a 30 m × 30 m M. polymorpha density dataset using SVM classifications that have been made publicly available for use in conservation applications. Accurate, large-scale species classifications are achievable, but metrics for model performance assessments must account for spatial variation of model accuracy.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article number4365
JournalRemote Sensing
Volume15
Issue number18
DOIs
StatePublished - Sep 2023

Keywords

  • Gaussian process classification
  • Metrosideros polymorpha
  • SMA
  • imaging spectroscopy
  • species classification
  • support vector machine

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • General Earth and Planetary Sciences

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