Advancing Multi-Scale Remote Sensing Applications for Hardwood Forest Management

Hardwood trees

Advancing Multi-Scale Remote Sensing Applications for Hardwood Forest Management

Hardwood forests are important timber sources and provide critical wildlife habitat, and their overall quality is closely related to management activities (Annand and Thompson 1997, Jenkins and Parker 1998, Morrissey et al. 2010). Forest management relies on spatially-explicit information on tree species composition and size structure. The conventional remote sensing data analysis is not effective enough to derive forest cover maps with sufficient information for forest management. The existing forest cover data in Indiana contain limited species information and no tree-size/age information. For example, the 1992 and 2001 National Land Cover Data classified all the hardwood forests into one forest type and are not useful for designing tree species/size-dependent sylviculture approaches. The land cover data developed by the Indiana Gap Analysis Project did not consider subclasses of hardwood forests either, and the overall accuracy of the map product was only 70.98%. When such low[1]accuracy forest-cover maps are used for forest management planning, actions may be unexpectedly misled due to error propagation (Shao et al. 2001&2003, Shao and Wu 2008). Therefore, it is important to obtain accurate forest cover maps with adequate forest-type and site-structure information. Such map products are broadly needed for intensive management of hardwood forest ecosystems, both publically and privately owned, in Indiana. Various remote sensing techniques have been extensively used in boreal and tropical forests but their applications in the central hardwood forest region are still limited. Our remote sensing experiment in Indiana will have broader implications to forest mapping in the central hardwood forest region.

Project Director: Guofan Shao 
10/01/2019 - 09/30/2024

Printable PDF Available

Learn More About Us

Purdue College of Agriculture.
FNR Field Reports: Bella Hilaski Recaps Week 3 of the Study Abroad Trip to Sweden, Finland

Throughout the 2025 Sustainable Natural Resources study abroad course in Sweden and Finland, FNR...

Read More
Dr. Rado Gazo holds some sliced pieces of wood called cookies
Rado Gazo Receives Lifetime Achievement Award from Forest Products Society

Dr. Rado Gazo, professor of wood processing and industrial engineering who has been a part of the...

Read More
Visiting undergraduate students William Brandenburg and Caroline Cousins fish with Tyler Hoskins, research assistant professor of forestry and natural resources.
Monitoring “forever chemicals” in your favorite fishing holes

Tyler Hoskins and Andrew Todd of the Department of Forestry and Natural Resources are studying...

Read More
Grace Brown banner photos from her Sweden study abroad trip, castle, Grace holding turtle and shoreline with rocks.
FNR Field Reports: Grace Brown Recaps Week 2 of Study Abroad Trip to Sweden, Finland

Grace Brown, a senior aquatic sciences major, shares her experiences on the Sustainable Natural...

Read More
Photos from Week 1 of the Sweden/Finland Study Abroad trip
FNR Field Reports: Autumn Hall Provides Week 1 Update from Sweden/Finland Study Abroad Trip

Autumn Hall, who is going into her senior year as an aquatic sciences major with a wildlife...

Read More
A view the Lake Superior shoreline
Max Moran Receives Norman S. Baldwin Fishery Scholarship for Research in Great Lakes

Graduate student Max Moran, a master’s degree student in the labs of Drs. Tomas...

Read More