Classification of Amazonian primary rain forest vegetation using Landsat ETM+ satellite imagery

A lack of spatially and thematically accurate vegetation maps complicates conservation and management planning, as well as ecological research, in tropical rain forests. Remote sensing has considerable potential to provide such maps, but classification accuracy within primary rain forests has generally been inadequate for practical applications. Here we test how accurately floristically defined forest types in lowland tropical rain forests in Peruvian Amazonia can be recognized using remote sensing data (Landsat ETM+ satellite image and STRM elevation model). Floristic data and a vegetation classification with four forest classes were available for eight line transects, each 8 km long, located in an area of ca 800 km2. We compared two sampling unit sizes (line transect subunits of 200 and 500 m) and several image feature combinations to analyze their suitability for image classification. Mantel tests were used to quantify how well the patterns in elevation and in the digital numbers of the satellite image correlated with the floristic patterns observed in the field. Most Mantel correlations were positive and highly significant. Linear discriminant analysis was used first to build a function that discriminates between forest classes in the eight field-verified transects on the basis of remotely sensed data, and then to classify those parts of the line transects and the satellite image that had not been visited in the field. Classification accuracy was quantified by 8-fold crossvalidation. Two of the tierra firme (non-inundated) forest types were combined because they were too often misclassified. The remaining three forest types (inundated forest, terrace forest and Pebas formation/intermediate tierra firme forest) could be separated using the 500-m sampling units with an overall classification accuracy of 85% and a Kappa coefficient of 0.62. For the 200-m sampling units, the classification accuracy was clearly lower (71%, Kappa 0.35). The forest classification will be used as habitat data to study wildlife habitat use in the same area. Our results show that remotely sensed data and relatively simple classification methods can be used to produce reasonably accurate forest type classifications, even in structurally homogeneous primary rain forests.