Testing the value of freely available Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) and OLI pan-sharpened imagery in discriminating commercial forest species

ABSTRACT The adoption of remotely sensed data in forest applications has grown significantly. Whereas high spatial resolution sensors have been successful in mapping and monitoring commercial forests, their cost, accessibility, and spatial coverage remain a critical challenge. Hence, it is was necessary to investigate the value of new and improved freely available sensors in forest species mapping using the Partial Least Square-Discriminant Analysis (PLS-DA). This study evaluated the performance of new freely available and improved raw and pan-sharpened Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) imagery in discriminating seven key plantation forest species in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Accuracies achieved using the Landsat (OLI) imagery were benchmarked against the WorldView-2 imagery. Results show that raw and pan-sharpened bands successfully delineated commercial forest species, with overall classification accuracies of 79% and 77.8%, respectively. Although these accuracies were lower than the 86.5% achieved from the higher resolution Worldview-2 image data, our findings demonstrate that the Landsat 8 OLI’s lower spatial resolution (30 m) generated a plausible performance in discriminating forest species. Hence, Landsat 8 OLI could be useful in providing existing and historical preliminary forestry assessment due to its free availability, wide spatial coverage as well as its rich archive dating back to the 1970s.