Advanced Land Cover Mapping of Tropical Peat Swamp Forest using Discrete Return Lidar

Abstract

The ability to better understand tropical peat ecosystems for restoration and climate change mitigation is often hampered by the lack of availability accurate and detailed data on vegetation cover and hydrologys, which is typically only derived from detailed and high-resolution imaging or field-based measurements. The aims of this study were to explore the potential advantage of airborne discrete-return lidar for mapping of forest cover in peat swamp forests. We used 2.8 pulse.m-1 lidar and the associated 1-m DTM derived from an airborne platform. The lidar dataset fully covered a 120 thousand hectare protection forest in Central Kalimantan. We extracted maximum vegetation heights in 5-m grid resolution to allow detailed mapping of the forest. We followed forest definition from FAO for forest and non-forest classification. We found that lidar was able to capture detail variation of canopy height in highresolution, thus provide more accurate classification. A comparison with existing maps suggested that the lidar-derived vegetation map was more consistent in defining canopy structure of the vegetation, with small standard deviations of the mean height of each class.