New JAXA High-Resolution Land Use/Land Cover Map for Vietnam Aiming for Natural Forest and Plantation Forest Monitoring

Highly detailed and accurate forest maps are important for various applications including forest monitoring, forestry policy, climate change, and biodiversity loss. This study demonstrates a comprehensive and geographically transferable approach to produce a 12 category high-resolution land use/land cover (LULC) map over mainland Vietnam in 2016 by remote sensing data. The map included several natural forest categories (evergreen broadleaf, deciduous (mostly deciduous broadleaf), and coniferous (mostly evergreen coniferous)) and one category representing all popular plantation forests in Vietnam such as acacia (Acacia mangium, Acacia auriculiformis, Acacia hybrid), eucalyptus (Eucalyptus globulus), rubber (Hevea brasiliensis), and others. The approach combined the advantages of various sensor data by integrating their posterior probabilities resulting from applying a probabilistic classifier (comprised of kernel density estimation and Bayesian inference) to each datum individually. By using different synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images (PALSAR-2/ScanSAR, PALSAR-2 mosaic, Sentinel-1), optical images (Sentinel-2, Landsat-8) and topography data (AW3D30), the resultant map achieved 85.6% for the overall accuracy. The major forest classes including evergreen broadleaf forests and plantation forests had a user’s accuracy and producer’s accuracy ranging from 86.0% to 95.3%. Our map identified 9.55 × 10⁶ ha (±0.16 × 10⁶ ha) of natural forests and 3.89 × 10⁶ ha (±0.11 × 10⁶ ha) of plantation forests over mainland Vietnam, which were close to the Vietnamese government’s statistics (with differences of less than 8%). This study’s result provides a reliable input/reference to support forestry policy and land sciences in Vietnam.