Forest Cover Mapping in North-Central Mexico: A Comparison of Digital Image Processing Methods

Abstract

Vegetation type is an environmental attribute that varies across the landscape and over time. Its continuous assessment is important for monitoring land use changes and forest degradation. There are advanced methods that can estimate the fractional cover of vegetation types within each pixel. This paper compares some methods for subpixel mapping of forest cover in the state of San Luis Potosí, Mexico, using Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS)-derived spectral data (MCD43A4). Three methods were tested: (1) Bayesian posterior probability, (2) the Fuzzy k nearest neighbor (FkNN), and (3) linear spectral mixture analysis (LSMA). While the Bayesian approach gave the poorest correlations, FkNN (r = 0.78) and LSMA (r = 0.81) estimations were successfully validated with information obtained from a Landsat image. This paper represents an interesting attempt to compare rarely reported FkNN with traditional approaches such as LSMA and the Bayesian one.