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© 2019 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.

Abstract

Comprehensive forest cover mapping is essential for making policy and management decisions. However, creating a forest cover map from raw remote sensing data is a barrier for many users. Here, we investigated the effects of different tree cover thresholds on the accuracy of forest cover maps derived from the Global Forest Change Dataset (GFCD) across different ecological zones in a country-scale evaluation of Myanmar. To understand the effect of different thresholds on map accuracy, nine forest cover maps having thresholds ranging from 10% to 90% were created from the GFCD. The accuracy of the forest cover maps within each ecological zone and at the national scale was assessed. The overall accuracies of ecological zones other than tropical rainforest were highest when the threshold for tree cover was less than 50%. The appropriate threshold for tropical rainforests was 80%. Therefore, different optimal tree cover thresholds were required to achieve the highest overall accuracy depending on ecological zones. However, in the unique case of Myanmar, we were able to determine the threshold across the whole country. We concluded that the threshold for tree cover for creating a forest cover map should be determined according to the areal ratio of ecological zones determined from large-scale monitoring. Our results are applicable to tropical regions having similar ecological zones.

Details

Title
Assessing the Importance of Tree Cover Threshold for Forest Cover Mapping Derived from Global Forest Cover in Myanmar
Author
Lwin, Kay Khaing 1 ; Ota, Tetsuji 2 ; Shimizu, Katsuto 3 ; Mizoue, Nobuya 4   VIAFID ORCID Logo 

 Graduate School of Bioresource and Bioenvironmental Sciences, Kyushu University, 744 Motooka, Fukuoka 819-0395, Japan; [email protected] 
 Institute of Decision Science for a Sustainable Society, Kyushu University, 744 Motooka, Fukuoka 819-0395, Japan 
 Forestry and Forest Products Research Institute, 1 Matsunosato, Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-8687, Japan; [email protected]; Faculty of Agriculture, Kyushu University, 744 Motooka, Fukuoka 819-0395, Japan; [email protected] 
 Faculty of Agriculture, Kyushu University, 744 Motooka, Fukuoka 819-0395, Japan; [email protected] 
First page
1062
Publication year
2019
Publication date
2019
Publisher
MDPI AG
e-ISSN
19994907
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
ProQuest document ID
2548450894
Copyright
© 2019 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.