What is it about?
two-phase sampling strategy for large-scale assessment of the total area and the total wood volume of fast-growing forest tree crops within agricultural land is presented. The first phase is performed using tessellation stratified sampling on high-resolution remotely sensed imagery and is sufficient for estimating the total area of plantations by means of a Monte Carlo integration estimator. The second phase is performed using stratified sampling of the plantations selected in the first phase and is aimed at estimating total wood volume by means of an approximation of the first-phase Horvitz-Thompson estimator. Vegetation indices from Sentinel-2 are exploited as freely available auxiliary information in a linear regression estimator to improve the design-based precision of the estimator based on the sole sample data.
Featured Image
Why is it important?
As distinctively concerns fast-growing tree plantations within agricultural farms, characterized by relatively short rotations and an intrinsic high dynamism in relation to the temporal variability of farmland destinations for cultivation, there is the need for a frequent updating of accurate and spatially detailed statistical data about tree species composition, stand structure and wood supply attributes. Such needs may exceed the scope of conventional forest inventories, making room for ad-hoc information sources.
Perspectives
The benefits of the strategy proposed here will be distinctively valuable for those countries and regions where short-rotation plantation forestry is well widespread. Taking fixed the first-phase sample of plantations – possibly selected during a NFI – the proposed second-phase sampling strategy can allow to update information on a short time; it has the advantage of being rapid and simple to be carried out, being particularly suited for fast-growing plantations, which rapidly alternate on agricultural lands, making conventional 5–10 years periodic inventory information temporally obsolete.
Piermaria Corona
CREA Research Centre for Forestry and Wood
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Large-scale two-phase estimation of wood production by poplar plantations exploiting Sentinel-2 data as auxiliary information, Silva Fennica, January 2020, Finnish Society of Forest Science,
DOI: 10.14214/sf.10247.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
