Synergistic Use of Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 to Map Natural Forest and Acacia Plantation and Stand Ages in North-Central Vietnam

Many remote sensing studies do not distinguish between natural and planted forests. We combine C-Band Synthetic Aperture Radar (Sentinel-1, S-1) and optical satellite imagery (Sentinel-2, S-2) and examine Random Forest (RF) classification of acacia plantations and natural forest in North-Central Vietnam. We demonstrate an ability to distinguish plantation from natural forest, with overall classification accuracies of 87% for S-1, and 92.5% and 92.3% for S-2 and for S-1 and S-2 combined respectively. We found that the ratio of the Short-Wave Infrared Band to the Red Band proved most effective in distinguishing acacia from natural forest. We used RF on S-2 imagery to classify acacia plantations into 6 age classes with an overall accuracy of 70%, with young plantation consistently separated from older. However, accuracy was lower at distinguishing between the older age classes. For both distinguishing plantation and natural forest, and determining plantation age, a combination of radar and optical imagery did nothing to improve classification accuracy.