Estimation of Forest Coverage in Northern Region of Mongolia Using Sentinel and Landsat Data

Abstract

Abstract. This paper aims to apply Forest Index (FI) and to determine forest coverage in the study area. The study area (49° 15ʹ to 49° 10ʹ N and 104° 05ʹ to 104° 15ʹ E) is located in the northern region of Mongolia and consist of mixed forest. Larch forest (86.12%) is dominating in the study area. The Sentinel-2 satellite data for the years 2015–2019 were used in the research. The land surface temperature (LST) was produced from Landsat-8 OL. FI methodology was applied for the Sentinel data in order to estimate larch forest coverage. The output map of forest coverage was compared with ground truth measurements and thematic map. The agreement between FI map and ground measurement was 85%. LST from Landsat and FI from Sentinel were sampled in to same size. The relationship between LST (Landsat-8) and FI (Sentinel-2) was reasonable (R = 0.5). FI index and LST is applicable for different forest type in the region.

Enhancement of tree canopy cover for the mapping of forest from the Sentinel-2 imagery

“…Various researchers have used Landsat data of (15 to 100 m) spatial resolution for forest cover mapping 4 , 5 . The Sentinel-2 data of (10 to 60 m) spatial resolution are also used for land cover mapping 6 , 7 . Similarly, other satellite data such as SPOT, 8 radar data such as TanDEM-X, 9 and airborne S-Band radar 10 are used to monitor forest and for degradation mapping.…”

Forest Cover Mapping Based on a Combination of Aerial Images and Sentinel-2 Satellite Data Compared to National Forest Inventory Data

“…In the last decade, various remote sensing-based methodologies have been used to map forest cover. The scales range from regional [12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23], nation-wide ( [7] for Switzerland, [1] for Canada, [24] for Kyrgyzstan, [25] for Norway, [26] for Canada's Boreal Zone, [27] for Ukraine plus Eastern Europe and [3] for Japan), pan-European [28][29][30] and post-Soviet Central Asian [8] to the global level [31][32][33][34][35][36]. Besides aerial images and light detection and ranging (LiDAR) data, mainly satellite data have been used for the mapping and monitoring of forested areas and vegetation.…”

“…Besides aerial images and light detection and ranging (LiDAR) data, mainly satellite data have been used for the mapping and monitoring of forested areas and vegetation. Most studies involved either Sentinel-2 data [12,13,17,18,20,25,29] or LANDSAT data [1,26,27,30,31,36,37]. In contrast, the authors of [15] used SPOT data for forest cover and forest degradation mapping, whereas other studies used radar data like TanDEM-X [33], airborne S-Band radar [16] or Sentinel-1 [14].…”