Assessing tree cover in agricultural landscapes using high-resolution aerial imagery

Trees used in agroforestry practices, such as windbreaks, provide a variety of ecosystem benefits and are recognized globally as an important land use. However, efforts to inventory and monitor agroforestry land use have been sporadic, short-lived, or focused on small spatial extents. There are a variety of satellite-derived datasets that provide information about tree cover over broad spatial extents, but most are based on satellite sensors with resolutions too coarse to accurately observe narrow plantings of trees. We derived area estimates of land with tree cover in North Dakota and South Dakota from the National Land Cover Dataset, the Cropland Data Layer, MODIS Vegetative Continuous Fields, and a MODIS land cover product. We compared these image-based estimates to estimates based on in situ observations of forest land from the USDA Forest Service's Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program.

[1]  William Lane Austin,et al.  The Census of Agriculture , 1930 .

[2]  A. Huete,et al.  A review of vegetation indices , 1995 .

[3]  William E. Easterling,et al.  Modelling the effect of shelterbelts on maize productivity under climate change : An application of the EPIC model , 1997 .

[4]  A. Rango,et al.  Combining Decision Trees with Hierarchical Object-oriented Image Analysis for Mapping Arid Rangelands , 2007 .

[5]  J. Wickham,et al.  Completion of the 2001 National Land Cover Database for the conterminous United States , 2007 .

[6]  S. Kulshreshtha,et al.  External economic benefits and social goods from prairie shelterbelts , 2008, Agroforestry Systems.

[7]  Robert M. Haralick,et al.  Textural Features for Image Classification , 1973, IEEE Trans. Syst. Man Cybern..

[8]  Mark H. Hansen,et al.  Line intersect sampling of wooded strips , 1985 .

[9]  M. Schoeneberger,et al.  Filling the gap: improving estimates of working tree resources in agricultural landscapes , 2008, Agroforestry Systems.

[10]  William A. Bechtold,et al.  The enhanced forest inventory and analysis program - national sampling design and estimation procedures , 2005 .

[11]  D. Walker,et al.  Quantification of shelterbelt characteristics using high-resolution imagery , 2009 .

[12]  Barry R. Noon,et al.  Biological Corridors: Form, Function, and Efficacy , 1997 .

[13]  C. Woodcock,et al.  The factor of scale in remote sensing , 1987 .

[14]  P. K. R. Nair,et al.  The agroforestry systems database at ICRAF , 1988 .

[15]  A. Rango,et al.  Object-oriented image analysis for mapping shrub encroachment from 1937 to 2003 in southern New Mexico , 2004 .

[16]  Johannes R. Sveinsson,et al.  Random Forests for land cover classification , 2006, Pattern Recognit. Lett..

[17]  J. Kort,et al.  Carbon reservoir and biomass in Canadian prairie shelterbelts , 1998, Agroforestry Systems.

[18]  Wei-Yin Loh,et al.  Classification and regression trees , 2011, WIREs Data Mining Knowl. Discov..

[19]  Bridget A. Emmett,et al.  Can tree shelterbelts on agricultural land reduce flood risk? , 2004 .

[20]  R. O'Neill,et al.  Scale problems in reporting landscape pattern at the regional scale , 1996, Landscape Ecology.

[21]  M. D. Nelson.  Satellite remote sensing for enhancing national forest inventory , 2005 .

[22]  Leo Breiman,et al.  Random Forests , 2001, Machine Learning.

[23]  P. Holmgren,et al.  Not all African land is being degraded: a recent survey of trees on farms in Kenya reveals rapidly increasing forest resources , 1994 .

[24]  T. Uçar,et al.  Windbreaks as a pesticide drift mitigation strategy: a review. , 2001, Pest management science.

[25]  A. Lister,et al.  Inventory of trees in nonforest areas in the Great Plains states , 2009 .

[26]  Ronald E. McRoberts,et al.  The enhanced forest inventory and analysis program , 2005 .

[27]  Christopher A. Barnes,et al.  Completion of the 2006 National Land Cover Database for the conterminous United States. , 2011 .

[28]  A. L. Hartong,et al.  Wooded strips in Iowa , 1956 .

[29]  R. Carucci.  Trees outside forests: an essential tool for desertification control in the Sahel , 2000 .