A Simulation of Image-Assisted Forest Monitoring for National Inventories
Southern Research Station, USDA Forest Service, 200 WT Weaver Blvd., Asheville, NC 28804, USA
Academic Editors: Joanne C. White and Timothy A. Martin
Forests 2016, 7(9), 204; https://doi.org/10.3390/f7090204
Received: 26 July 2016 / Revised: 29 August 2016 / Accepted: 7 September 2016 / Published: 15 September 2016
The efficiency of national forest monitoring efforts can be increased by the judicious incorporation of ancillary data. For instance, a fixed number of ground plots might be used to inform a larger set of annual estimates by observing a smaller proportion of the plots each year while augmenting each annual estimate with ancillary data in order to reduce overall costs while maintaining a desired level of accuracy. Differencing successive geo-rectified remotely sensed images can conceivably provide forest change estimates at a scale and level of accuracy conducive to the improvement of temporally relevant forest attribute estimates. Naturally, the degree of improvement in the desired estimates is highly dependent on the relationships between the spatial-temporal scales of ground plot and remotely sensed observations and the desired spatial-temporal scale of estimation. In this paper, fixed scales of observation for each data source are used to explore the value of three different levels of information available from the remotely sensed image-change estimates. Four populations are simulated and sampled under four sampling error structures. The results show that the image change estimates (ICE) can be used to significantly reduce bias for annual estimates of harvest and mortality and that improved estimation of harvest and mortality can sometimes, but not always, contribute to better estimates of standing volume.
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MDPI and ACS Style
Roesch, F.A. A Simulation of Image-Assisted Forest Monitoring for National Inventories. Forests 2016, 7, 204. https://doi.org/10.3390/f7090204
AMA Style
Roesch FA. A Simulation of Image-Assisted Forest Monitoring for National Inventories. Forests. 2016; 7(9):204. https://doi.org/10.3390/f7090204
Chicago/Turabian StyleRoesch, Francis A. 2016. "A Simulation of Image-Assisted Forest Monitoring for National Inventories" Forests 7, no. 9: 204. https://doi.org/10.3390/f7090204
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