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Forests
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Advances in Forest Cover Change and Its Ecological and Environmental...
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Advances in Forest Cover Change and Its Ecological and Environmental Effects—Series II

A special issue of Forests (ISSN 1999-4907). This special issue belongs to the section "Forest Inventory, Modeling and Remote Sensing".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 December 2024 | Viewed by 257

Special Issue Editors

Prof. Dr. Wei Shui

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
College of Environment and Safety Engineering, Fuzhou University, Fuzhou, China
Interests: ecogeography; land use/cover change and ecological effects; remote sensing and geographic information technology applications; urban and rural planning
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Dr. Junyu Qi

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
CMNS—Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA
Interests: environmental impact assessment; hydrological modeling; watershed hydrology; water resources management
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Forests are of interest for environmental construction banks, water conservation, climate regulation, biodiversity conservation and other benefits. Due to the warming climate and extensive human activities, forest ecosystems have suffered significant damage. The "Global Forest Cover Status and Change" report highlights that forest cover has decreased since the 21st century. The ecological benefits of forest cover for human health and sustainable social development are immense. Consequently, new theoretical perspectives, interdisciplinary approaches, and multi-source data are urgently required to explore the inherent issues, hypotheses, and themes in the field of forest cover and its ecological environmental effects.

The debate on the intrinsic link between forest cover changes and the environment continues. We invite you to share your innovative research in this field to this Special Issue of Forests entitled "Advances in Forest Cover Change and Its Ecological and Environmental Effects". The main objective of our Special Issue is to collect and disseminate the latest advances in forest cover change and its ecological and environmental effects. We encourage scholars from around the world to submit research papers investigating the relationship between forest cover and ecological environments using field surveys, experiments, remote sensing applications, GIS, geostatistical techniques, intelligent computing, forecasting, and simulations. We hope to highlight the latest advances in the field of conserving the environment and outline possible issues requiring further exploration to provide a more solid scientific basis and technological support for global and regional sustainable development.

Prof. Dr. Wei Shui
Dr. Junyu Qi
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Forests is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • forest land cover
  • environmental factors
  • ecological effects
  • environmental effects
  • biodiversity
  • ecological geography

Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

22 pages, 14488 KiB  
Article
Improving Tree Cover Estimation for Sparse Trees Mixed with Herbaceous Vegetation in Drylands Using Texture Features of High-Resolution Imagery
by Haolin Huang, Zhihui Wang, Junjie Chen and Yonglei Shi
Forests 2024, 15(5), 847; https://doi.org/10.3390/f15050847 (registering DOI) - 12 May 2024
Viewed by 140
Abstract
Tree cover is a crucial vegetation structural parameter for simulating ecological, hydrological, and soil erosion processes on the Chinese Loess Plateau, especially after the implementation of the Grain for Green project in 1999. However, current tree cover products performed poorly across most of [...] Read more.
Tree cover is a crucial vegetation structural parameter for simulating ecological, hydrological, and soil erosion processes on the Chinese Loess Plateau, especially after the implementation of the Grain for Green project in 1999. However, current tree cover products performed poorly across most of the Loess Plateau, which is characterized by grasslands with sparse trees. In this study, we first acquired high-accuracy samples of 0.5 m tree canopy and 30 m tree cover using a combination of unmanned aerial vehicle imagery and WorldView-2 (WV-2) imagery. The spectral and textural features derived from Landsat 8 and WV-2 were then used to estimate tree cover with a random forest model. Finally, the tree cover estimated using WV-2, Landsat 8, and their combination were compared, and the optimal tree cover estimates were also compared with current products and tree cover derived from canopy classification. The results show that (1) the normalized difference moisture index using Landsat 8 shortwave infrared and the standard deviation of correlation metric calculated by means of gray-level co-occurrence matrix using the WV-2 near-infrared band are the optimal spectral feature and textural feature for estimating tree cover, respectively. (2) The accuracy of tree cover estimated using only WV-2 is highest (RMSE = 7.44%), indicating that high-resolution textural features are more sensitive to tree cover than the Landsat spectral features (RMSE = 11.53%) on grasslands with sparse trees. (3) Textural features with a resolution higher than 8 m perform better than the combination of Landsat 8 and textural features, and the optimal resolution is 2 m (RMSE = 7.21%) for estimating tree cover, whereas the opposite is observed when the resolution of textural features is lower than 8 m. (4) The current global product seriously underestimates tree cover on the Loess Plateau, and the tree cover calculation using the canopy classification of high-resolution imagery performs worse than the method of directly using remote sensing features. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advances in Forest Cover Change and Its Ecological and Environmental Effects—Series II)
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