Land cover mapping for tropical forest rehabilitation planning using remotely-sensed data

Lack of reliable and up-to-date maps relating to land cover (among other themes) constitute a weakness in land resource surveys and cause costly failures to many forest rehabilitation projects in the tropics. This study evaluated the utility of satellite imagery for land cover mapping for forest rehabilitation planning in a case study in Mindoro, Philippines. Using Landsat TM data, visual and digital image processing techniques were performed using the GRID module of ARC/INFO and the microBRIAN image processing software. Crown cover density is found as the most useful and the most important detail of information the image could provide. Detailed mapping at the species and forest type levels is unreliable, as is the delineation of water bodies and some cultural features in rugged terrain. Clustering of the NDVI image is found more applicable in producing land cover maps depicting crown cover classes than classifying raw TM-3, -4, and -5.