Assessing forest canopy closure in a geospatial medium to address management concerns for tropical islands—Southeast Asia

Abstract

The present study outlines an approach to classify forest density and to estimate canopy closure of the forest of the Andaman and Nicobar archipelago. The vector layers generated for the study area using satellite data was validated with the field knowledge of the surveyed ground control points. The methodology adopted in this present analysis is three-tiered. First, the density stratification into five zones using visual interpretation for the complete archipelago. In the second step, we identified two island groups from the Andaman to investigate and compare the forest strata density. The third and final step involved more of a localised phytosociological module that focused on the North Andaman Islands. The results based on the analysis of the high-resolution satellite data show that more than 75% of the mangroves are under high- to very high-density canopy class. The framework developed would serve as a significant measure to forest health and evaluate management concerns whilst addressing issues such as gap identification, conservation prioritisation and disaster management--principally to the post-tsunami assessment and analysis.

Assessing Plant Diversity in a Dry Tropical Forest: Comparing the Utility of Landsat and Ikonos Satellite Images

“…Much expectation has been raised about the utility of high resolution satellite imagery for ecological research [1][2][3], yet so far the hype has largely outpaced actual field assessments. This is particularly the case in the tropics.…”

“…Hence, past efforts to use these satellites for ecological studies such as plant diversity estimation have achieved only moderate success [11]. The major use these datasets have been put to in these habitats is for habitat mapping or land cover/land use research [6,3,12].…”

Carbon stock assessment using forest canopy density mapper in agroforestry land in Berau, East Kalimantan, Indonesia

“…This study was aimed to investigate the application of FCD in carbon stock assessment to enrich knowledge developed by many existing studies related to forest cover assessment using satellite images, for example Rikimaru (1996), Rikimaru and Miyatake (1997), Baynes (2007), Joshi et al (2005), Panta et al (2006), Prasad et al (2009) and Mon et al (2010). Tree stand density, basal area, and forest canopy profile are commonly used as parameters to measure forest density and forest vegetation condition.…”

Contour Extraction based on Circular Hough Transform for Forest Canopy Digital Hemispherical Photography

“…Forest canopy characteristics are important in various applications, such as the conservation and restoration of understory species [2], invasive species control, post-tsunami assessment and analysis [20], acceleration of hurricane recovery, monitoring of water and carbon cycles [16,24], and radioecology [14]. Forest canopy characteristics include many physical and measurable variables such as canopy closure [18], canopy coverage, diffuse non-interceptance (DIFN) [23], gap fraction [21], leaf area index [19], light metering, etc.…”