Using Remote Sensing technology for dynamic
monitoring forest resources
Kou Wenzheng, Xu Maosong
Sun Xiangran, Zhang Reixi
Academy of Forest Inventory, Planning and
Designing, Ministry of Forestry, PRC
Abstract
The RGC method has been developed for dynamic monitoring of forest resources which combines Remote Sensing technique, Geographic Information System (GIS) and traditional Continuous Forest Inventory (CFI) technique. The technical designing of RGC method, the functions and contributions of each techniques to RGC method, the advantages of RGC method of and an example of using RGC method for monitoring resources in Jilin province of China are fully described in this paper.
Introduction
Forest is an important biological resources. It has the characteristics of wide distributions and long growing period. Changes often take place under the actions of man-made elements and natural elements. Promptly and accurately monitoring dynamic changes of forest resources, mastering the changing regularity of forest resources, have an important social, economic and ecological significance. The methods of monitoring forest resources have caused common interests of international specialists in forestry. In China, dynamic monitoring of forest resources mainly depends on CFI system. All over the country, more than 250,000 permanent sample plots have been established, and checked every 5 years, In this paper, we introduce RGC method which combines remote sensing technique, GIS technique and traditional CFI system to enrich and improve the methods of dynamic monitoring of forest resources.
RGC Method
RGC method is based on remote sensing technique, GIS technique & CFI technique, to assimilate the advantages of each technique, to monitor dynamic changes of forest resources. Remote sensing information is used to extract the areas of each land classes and the distributions of forest types; GIS is used to determine the geographic location to ensure repeatedly examining same sample plot; CFI system is used in necessary surveys. It is the central point of RGC method to completely and accurately obtain continuous and comparable dynamic estimations of forest resources.
Compared with traditional CFI technology, RGC method has following advantages:
- Increasing the precision of forest resources allocation maps and the precision of corresponding statistics;
- Effectively decreasing unnecessary field works. In low forest coverage areas, the effect is ore evident;
- Increasing the area estimation precision of each classes; solving the area estimation of small proportions classes under the circumstance of not increasing field works;
- To some extent, decreasing the influences of error estimations in CFI system.
