Random Forest Regression Model for Estimation of the Growing Stock Volumes in Georgia, USA, Using Dense Landsat Time Series and FIA Dataset

Abstract

The forest volumes are essential as they are directly related to the economic and environmental values of the forests. Satellite-based forest volume estimation was first developed in the 1990s, and the accuracy of the estimation has been improved over time. One of the satellite-based forest volume estimation issues is that it tends to overestimate the large volume class and underestimate the small volume class. Free availability of the major satellite imagery and the development of cloud-based computational platforms facilitate an immense amount of satellite imagery in the estimation. In this paper, we set three objectives: (1) to examine whether the long Landsat time series contributes to the improvement of the estimation accuracy, (2) to explore the effectiveness of forest disturbance record and land cover data as ancillary spatial data on the accuracy of the estimation, and (3) to apply the bias correction method to reduce the bias of the estimation. We computed three Tasseled-cap components from the Landsat data for preparation of short (2014–2016) and long (1984–2016) time series. Each data entity was analyzed with harmonic regressions resulting in the coefficients and the fitted values recorded as pixel values in a multilayer raster database. Data included Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) unit field inventory measurements provided by the United States Department of Agriculture Forest Service and the National Land Cover Database and disturbance history data added as ancillary information. The totality of the available data was organized into seven distinct Random Forest (RF) models with different variables compared against each other to identify the ones with the most satisfactory performance. A bias correction method was then applied to all the RF models to examine the effectiveness of the method. Among the seven models, the worst one used the coefficients and fitted values of the short Landsat time series only, and the best one used coefficients and fitted values of both short and long Landsat time series. Using the Out-of-bag (OOB) score, the best model was found to be 34.4% better than the worst one. The model that used only the long time series data had almost the same OOB score as the best model. The results indicate that the use of the long Landsat time series improves model performance. Contrary to the previous research employing forest disturbance data as a feature variable had almost no effect on OOB. The bias correction method reduced the relative size of the bias in the estimates of the best model from 3.79% to −1.47%, the bottom 10% bias by 12.5 points, and the top 10% bias by 9.9 points. Depending on the types of forest, important feature variables were differed, reflecting the relationship between the time series remote sensing data we computed for this research and the forests’ phenological characteristics. The availability of Light Detection And Ranging (LiDAR) data and accessibility of the precise locations of the FIA data are likely to improve the model estimates further.

Estimation of Boreal Forest Growing Stock Volume in Russia from Sentinel-2 MSI and Land Cover Classification

“…The simplest approaches are based on multispectral analysis of freely-available VNIR imagery having a spatial resolution of the order of 10 m or coarser [11][12][13][14][15][16][17]. Useful enrichment of the available feature space has been demonstrated using multitemporal datasets [18][19][20][21], incorporating texture measures [14,22] and field-derived or satellite-derived three-dimensional information [23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30]. Other approaches are based on the use of ultra-high-resolution VNIR imagery (usually not free of cost) [31,32], radar imagery [1,[33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46], or combinations of VNIR and radar imagery [47][48][49][50][51][52][53].…”

Mapping and Estimating Forest Stand Volume using Machine Learning Methods and Multi-Spectral Sentinel 2 Data

“…Research has demonstrated that RF can be used to integrate spectrum data into regression investigations, sometimes producing better results than conventional regression techniques (Dos Reis et al, 2018). For data-based predictions, such as forest attribute estimation, RF regression is frequently utilized (Obata et al, 2021). The ability of an RF model to assess a variable's importance-that is, the degree to which each feature variable contributes to the model's prediction-is one of its main benefits (Obata et al, 2021).…”

Sector-Based Stock Price Prediction with Machine Learning Models

“…The random forest technique can also process big data with thousands of variables. A class can automatically balance datasets when data is less sparse than other classes [23].…”