Employing ground and satellite-based QuickBird data and random forest to discriminate five tree species in a Southern African Woodland

With the emergence of very high spatial and spectral resolution data set, the resolution gap that existed between remote-sensing data set and aerial photographs has decreased. The decrease in resolution gap has allowed accurate discrimination of different tree species. In this study, discrimination of indigenous tree species (n = 5) was carried out using ground based hyperspectral data resampled to QuickBird bands and the actual QuickBird imagery for the area around Palapye, Botswana. The purpose of the study was to compare the accuracies of resampled hyperspectral data (resampled to QuickBird sensors) with the actual image (QuickBird image) in discriminating between the indigenous tree species. We performed Random Forest (RF) using canopy reflectance taking from ground-based hyperspectral sensor and the reflectance delineated regions of the tree species. The overall accuracies for classifying the five tree species was 79.86 and 88.78% for both the resampled and actual image, respectively. We observed that resampled data set can be upscale to actual image with the same or even greater level of accuracy. We therefore conclude that high spectral and spatial resolution data set has substantial potential for tree species discrimination in savannah environments.