Application of high spatial resolution satellite imagery for riparian and forest ecosystem classification

Terrestrial Ecosystem Mapping provides critical information to land and resource managers by incorporating information on climate, physiography, surficial material, soil, and vegetation structure. The main objective of this research was to determine the capacity of high spatial resolution satellite image data to discriminate vegetation structural stages in riparian and adjacent forested ecosystems as defined using the British Columbia Terrestrial Ecosystem Mapping (TEM) scheme. A high spatial resolution QuickBird image, captured in June 2005, and coincident field data covering the riparian area of Lost Shoe Creek and adjacent forests on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, was used in this analysis. Semi-variograms were calculated to assess the separability of vegetation structural stages and assess which spatial scales were most appropriate for calculation of grey-level co-occurrence texture measures to maximize structural class separation. The degree of spatial autocorrelation showed that most vegetation structural types in the TEM scheme could be differentiated and that window sizes of 3 × 3 pixels and 11 × 11 pixels were most appropriate for image texture calculations. Using these window sizes, the texture analysis showed that co-occurrence contrast, dissimilarity, and homogeneity texture measures, based on the bands in the visible part of the spectrum, provided the most significant statistical differentiation between vegetation structural classes. Subsequently, an object-oriented classification algorithm was applied to spectral and textural transformations of the QuickBird image data to map the vegetation structural classes. Using both spectral and textural image bands yielded the highest classification accuracy (overall accuracy = 78.95%). The inclusion of image texture increased the classification accuracies of vegetation structure by 2–19%. The results show that information on vegetation structure can be mapped effectively from high spatial resolution satellite image data, providing an additional tool to ongoing aerial photograph interpretation.